3 machines, 2 chip achitectures, 1 external FW drive?

[bkpr]

Hi all.

I've just bought a 500 GB external drive. I want to use it to back up my Mac Pro (when it arrives), my PowerBook G4, and my girlfriend's iBook G4. I'll be using SuperDuper to create updateable sparse images of all three systems.

If I have all images for all three macs on one drive, will I be able to mount the right drive with disk utility on the appropriate machine? I.e.: will Disk Utility on the Mac Pro (Intel) be able to see and mount the intel sparse image? similarly, will the PowerBook/iBook's Disk Utility be able to see and mount the PPC images?

_thanks in advance
_bkpr

[dnanian]

Yes: the disk format is the same for all three, it should be no problem.

Note, though, that if this drive is going to be physically connected to one of the Macs, I'd create a partition for that Mac so you can do a direct backup, and then a partition for the other two sparse images. Make sure the partition format is appropriate for the Mac type (if this is an Intel Mac, I'd use GUID, otherwise Apple Partition Map).

Hope that helps.

[bkpr]

Thanks!

I'll have a complete 'direct' backup on another internal drive on the mac pro, so I was hoping to keeo it simple and have three sparse images on the external drive, which will sit along other files, like a rotating backup of my design work.

In this case, do you know whether I'll still need to partition into PPC and Intel? As I understand it, the drive will mount on either machine for reading and writing files, regardles of chip architecture. It only becomes and issue with booting. I guess I was hoping to have the drive formatted with one volume, that all macs can read from.

When you use disk uility to from the install DVD to mount a sparse image (to clone back to a crashed drive) do you actually BOOT that sparse image? Or does SD! just copy the files directlly back to the crashed drive?

I guess the install DVD won't have SD! running on it, so the answer would be no...

[dnanian]

Fair enough. No, you won't have to partition (just make sure it's formated as HFS+).

And, no -- you don't boot the image: you can't boot from a drive that's not "physical"...

[bkpr]

OK. That makes me happy. hank you for your quick responses!