I need some help setting up my external hard drives.

I don't want to keep client images on my Macbook Pro. I have a 500gb hard drive (hard drive A) I want to treat as if it were my own laptop. I also have a 1 terabyte hard drive I want to partition into two 500gbs (Hard drive B.) So essentially the hard drive B to back up hard drive A, but i will essentially have two copies since it will be partitioned - know what i mean?

yeah i need help.

anyone good with this?

I went to the mac store - for my one-to-one appointment and they messed it all up. They made the 1 terabyte as as if it were mirroring my hard drive on my macbook - so if i delete whats on here now, it gets deleted on my external???? duh. The whole point is to get this stuff thats eating up all of my memory as it is - off the laptop - and start treating the other laptop as home base. So needless to say, i have to move everything on the 1 terabyte off - so i can reformatt it (to a 350gb that i have) and then reinstall so the terabyte is split - then open my 500 so it can serve as the home hard drive.

whoa- did that makes sense?

how do you all backup? store/edit images???

*confused*

k:)

Keri will you be using this solely on a Mac? If so then I wouldn't waste time on FAT file system and go right to Mac OS journaled. Just go into disk utility and on the erase tab you can format the drive.

The setup I currently use for external back up is two identical Mybook drives. I seup a file structure to have year, then month, then couples name. I copy the files to the folder on one drive. Then I copy them to the other drive exactly the same. This way if there are any errors in copying they are not reproduced by copying one drive to the other.

If you need anything else, I'd be happy to walk you thru it.
-Paul

Hi Keri,

I just gave a talk on this topic to the Professional Photographers of Oregon. Let me see if I can clear things up for you a bit.

You can easily move your images over to the new external 500GB hard drive and access them from your macbook pro. There's no magic there. Just move the files from their current location on you macbook pro's laptop drive. Then, when you want to edit files you'll need to be sure that the external drive is connected. To ensure those photos are secure on the external drive at the very least you'll want to create a nightly backup of that disk using backup software or some other automated plan lest you forget to do it manually. I recommend Retrospect Backup or De Ja Vu for this.

The terabyte drive you have would make an excellent backup drive but partitioning it isn't something that will benefit you. If what I understand you want to do is correct, it doesn't really help you out. It sounds like you plan to partition the terabyte disk into two 500gb partitions and then mirror them so you have your data backed up from the external disk onto the two mirrors of the terabyte drive. This does not provide you with redundancy since the two partitions reside on the same physical disk that can die.

I recommend you buy a second 500GB disk of the same make and model as your first 500GB disk and mirror them together with Mac OS X's Disk Utility program. This will give you the protection of a mirrored set should one of the hard drives fail. Then, you can use that terabyte drive to backup not only your laptop's hard drive but also backup the 500GB external mirror in case you accidentally delete a file or the drives get corrupted or something similarly sinister.

If you need more help with setting this all up, please feel free to email me and I'll walk you through it.

Here's a link to the presentation I gave last weekend at the PPO's conference for reference.

Jeff LaPlante Photogrpahy - Dealing with the Data Glut of Going Digital

All the best,

Jeff LaPlante

thanks guys! im sure i could use your help -- who knew! haha...

i have the mybook's as well.. the partially used 350gb, the new in the box 500 gb and then 1 terabyte that has a bit of information on it as well..


Paul- what is this:


Jeff- you got mail!

thanks guys!!!!

HUGS!