[tomahawk9]

follow on questions from this thread - useful

I want to do something similar but in fact i want to have three bootable backups + a large media library on an external drive (music, movies, pictures)

1) Imac G5 Running 10.4.11
2) Macbook Pro running 10.4.11
3) Macbook Pro bootcamp partition running XP.
4) Media Files

I figured for ease it would easiest to do this all on one 1.5T disk
(two for the backup swap as i refine the process)

reading a lot of different threads from different sources, i have questions as follows-i plan to use CCC, but could just as easily use superduper.

1) should the backup drive (bud) be formatted in FAT32 (that will work for both mac and bootcamp boots?)
2) should the bud be partitioned, and the partitions formatted differently?
one for mac one for bootcamp/win

3) should i use the disk imaging suggestion below by CCC? This also seems less than perfect. ..
4) will upgrading to leopard make this easier or harder?
5) any thoughts on partitioning the individual computer hard drives. seems not necessary for operating efficiency but may ease backs by splitting out the operating system and data/apps.


Any tactical and sequencing advice appreciated...thought this would be easier than it is! sure i will have some more questions...

FROM CCC
file://localhost/Volumes/Carbon%20Copy%20Cloner/Carbon%20Copy%20Cloner.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/CCCHelp/CCCHelp.html?page=usage#backup_scenario

"I want to backup multiple machines to the same hard drive, each to its own disk image on the drive"

Sometimes backing up your data to a single external hard drive is just too messy and difficult to organize. Suppose, for example, that you have three computers in your household, and everyone backs up to the same firewire hard drive. Where do you put each person's backup? The single hard drive can't maintain multiple operating systems, Mac OS X does not support that. You could split the drive into three partitions, but that isn't very flexible at all. You could clone each person's drive to a folder on the drive, but that's a little difficult to restore from.

A very good solution in a scenario such as this is to use disk images as the medium of your backup. A disk image is a single file residing on your hard drive that contains the entire contents of another hard drive (except for the free space). When you want to access the contents of that filesystem, you double-click on the disk image to mount the disk image as if it were an external drive attached to the machine. Carbon Copy Cloner 3 leverages disk images to provide you the flexibility of storing several complete, bootable*** backups on a single shared external hard drive. (*** Disk images themselves are not bootable, but you can mount them and restore their content to a physical hard drive to produce a bootable, exact replica of the original).

When you want to copy the entire contents or a selection of data from your hard drive to a disk image, select "New disk image..." or "Choose disk image..." from the target menu. If you want to restore a drive from a disk image backup, boot from a drive other than the target, select "Restore from disk image..." from the source menu and locate the disk image. Choose the drive to which you would like to restore from the target menu.

Learn more about backing up to and restoring from disk images