Planning a BU strategy, am I on track?
 

I bought SD and LOVE it so far and reccommend it to everyone.

I am trying to plan a BU strategy for my designer girlfriends g4 dual boot tower, yea she still goes back to Quark 4.1.

The machine has 3 internal HDs with a total of 172 gigs of data on...
an 80 gig OSX vol space used 7 gigs
an 80 gig OS 9 vol space used 20 gigs
a 250 gig archive vol for past work space used 145 gigs
There is also a external 300 gig FW Maxtor one touch that she carries home.

I erased the 300 gig Maxtor as I am getting rid of Retrospect BU software that came with it but Disk Utility will not let me partition the drive, I don't have a partition button! Anyone know what that is about? I have not had time to Google the problem yet.

So for now my plan is to for now use SD to create 3 images (one of each drive) and store them on the FW Maxtor.

Eventually when she is weened from Quark and I can reformat and reuse the os9 80 gig vol I would like to purchase another 250 internal so I have a pair of each and have SD auto BU every night so each morning she has a bootable cloned 80 gig OS vol and a cloned 250 gig archive vol. I would still like to BU to the Maxtor weekly for offsite BU.

So my questions are...

Am I on the right track?
Why can't I partition the Maxtor?
If i can partition the maxtor does the SD partition I am cloning to have to be the same size or larger than the parent vol or does it just have to be large enough for the data, for example the OS vol, although it is an 80 only has less than 10 gigs on it. I would like to setup the 300 partitioned into two partitions, one 250 gig for the archive and one 50 gig for the OS.

Thanks

OK -- to partition the drive, select the *drive* itself, above the volumes that are present. You'll be able to partition at that point, and won't need to use images.

Your has to be large enough for the data, plus some slack (say, 20% or so) if you want to boot from it. Don't size things too closely: data grows...