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Old 02-10-2005, 11:22 PM
sliderule53 sliderule53 is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2005
Posts: 3
Removing partitions

I just got SuperDuper and a new external 200GB firewire drive and I would like to make sure I understand things before I proceed. I have a nominal 60GB internal drive currently partitioned into four volumes for reasons that seemed good at the time. Now, however, each partition is exactly the wrong size so I would like to move my data off the internal disk onto an empty partition on the external drive, remove the partitions on the internal drive, and then move all the data back to the internal drive. Does this strategy and the following procedure make sense?:

1. Partition new external drive into 3 volumes: ~15GB Sandbox (bootable Safety Clone); a large bootable backup volume; and a separate ~50GB volume for work-related stuff (this is a home system).

2. Copy all 4 internal volumes sequentially to the same initially empty partition on the external drive using “Backup-all files” and “Copy different files from internal volume to external backup” to avoid erasing anything. (Only one of these four volumes has system data so I might be tempted to just drag-copy the other 3 volumes to the external drive, but I gather this might be a bad idea with OSX, is that right?)

3. Use Disk Utility to remove partitions on internal drive.

4. Use SuperDuper and “Backup-all files” to move all the data from the single external volume that was filled back to the internal drive without partitions.

5. Create a Safety Clone from the internal drive into the Sandbox volume on the external drive and boot from that.

6. Do regular Smart Updates to back up the internal drive onto the backup volume of the external drive.

This is a multiple user system with the iTunes and iPhoto libraries currently in a separate partition from OSX so obviously I am hoping these can still be found by their applications after all of this is done with.

And one other question I have is: why does your manual (p.47) suggest putting the Sandbox volume in the bottom partition?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me.
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