[mizliz]

Hey everyone,
I'm being told by many people that it's a good idea to back up my iBook stuff onto an external harddrive. What's a "good" external harddrive and how much space does one really need (I want to store my over 3,000 pictures from iPhoto, my music, etc.)? I'd like to keep my budget to around $200 or less if at all possible. Any ideas?
Thanks!
Liz

[mdawson]

You have not mentioned which iBook you have or the capacity of your iBooks hard drive. Your current hard drive capacity would determine the bare minimum size for your external hard drive. Given that the largest hard drive sold with iBooks was 80 GB and that the smallest 3.5-inch drives currently available are of the 80 GB we will start there.
Other World Computing (OWC) offers some excellent FireWire, USB and multi-port hard drive enclosures. They also offer excellent pricing on bare hard drives; I would strongly recommend sticking with Hitachi or Seagate. The thought of installing a hard drive into an enclosure may sound a bit scary, but it is a simple process. You could also opt for OWCs pre-packaged hard drive enclosures as they also include a free copies of EMCs Retrospect Express and Intechs Hard Disk SpeedTools. Your options are the Mercury Elite-AL, Mercury Elite Pro Classic, Neptune and miniStack.
All of OWCs options are excellent, in fact, my girlfriend has a miniStack for her iBook and she loves its. It also helps that the miniStack has a built-in USB and FireWire hub as she uses her laptop as her desktop at home.

[macnuke]

I second mdawson's recommendations.
my only addition to it would be to get as large of volume as you can.
A small partition/large partition would be nice in that you can use Disk Utilities on any unmounted volume to a greater extent.
The will be most helpful in the maintenance of your internal as well as external drive.
small partition bootable with minimum OS and utilities on it.
large partition for all your backup data.. and yes, that one can be bootable as well (clone)

I am drive rich. so i have an "On-The'Go" drive from OWC with nothing but a bootable OS and all of my 3rd party Disk Utilities on it. makes it nice not only for all of my Macs, but if a local friend is in a bind, I have bailed them as well.

[RichL]

I have 6 OWC enclosures.
They work great and are easy to set up and use.
Sticking a HD in them (if you go that route) is also very easy to do.
get the largest drive you can afford.
RichL

[schokid02]

All of the suggestions so far have been excellent, but I'll add some more basic stuff here.
I'll support your friends' recommendations that you back up your data. Basically you will want to buy an external HD that is at least as large as the internal HD on your iBook. The benefit of buying an external backup HD is that you can setup up multiple partitions (before transfering any data). One partition can be used to clone your current drive, giving you a complete, bootable backup of your current drive, while the remaining space can be used for extra storage. You just need to decide what you want to use your external drive for and then how much space you will need. Given the prices though, I'd say go with something 2x-3x the size of your current drive.

[ladyuser101]

Hi mizliz.
I use a 2.5 inch bootable firewire external hard drive the same size as my internal PB hard drive and back up with Carbon Copy Cloner. macnuke's advice is, as usual, really good. When I started out, he suggested an external drive for repair and restore so I now have two external drives - backup and R&R. They carry really well with a portable. If you work mostly at home, the larger 3.5 inch drives work well especially if you have an enclosure with a fan.
Backup strategy is a different thing. The simplest is to backup to an external hard drive. More complicated strategies include dual backups to HDDs and DVDs also and even one set located offsite in case of fire. There are different levels of risk or performance so you have to choose what you feel comfortable doing.
HTH /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif