Apple Back up hard drive

hello, i am wanting to buy a hard drive to back up all my music and pictures just incase of a failure. So my apple MBP has a 120gb HD and i currently have 20Gb of music and 5Gb photo's (roughly).

I was wondering if anyone could make any recommendations etc, or hard drives that work well with macs? or can i buy pretty much any hard drive out there?

many thanks

 

as long as you reformat the hdd with disk utility you can use any you like afaik

 

I can't think of a drive with the correct connections that wont work, you might want to re format the drive though,

As i'm sure you know, Firewire for speed, USB2 for cheapness

 

thanks for that, i have had a look on the apple website and one or two take my fancy, unless i can get my dad to go for an apple time capsule and we could share it over the wireless

 

Anything should work fine. I've got a self-assembled Seagate 320GB SATA drive in a random USB/eSATA enclosure (not sure the name off the top of my head but Thermaltake rebrands some of them I think) as well as a 500GB WD MyBook. I'd recommend the latter as it's got FW400 (x2 for whatever reason), USB2, and eSATA and the price was pretty good. I reformatted it to HFS+ but that's not strictly necessary though highly recommended (esp. if you're using it for backups since FAT32 has a max 4GB file size and NTFS is read only).

If you have an airport extreme base station, you should be able to use a USB drive as a time machine drive now. I'm doing it and I don't think I ever ran the hack so I assume it was set up in 10.5.2. However, I've had mixed luck actually restoring anything over wireless... which I didn't realize until I actually wanted to restore something.

 

If you have Leopard and you want to use Time Machine, it must be an HFS+ formatted drive. However, any drive works. Right now I have a Fantom 500GB (a Western Digital in a case) and a Samsung F1 750GB in a NewerTechnologies MiniStack. The ministack is silent, and the Fantom is LOUD. However, there should be no hard drives that do not work at all. Time Capsule is pretty sweet!

 

I have a Fantom 500 gig as well, and if you can spare the extra ~20 bucks I say go for the firewire. Anything should work, just remember to format it to HFS+ if you intend to ever use time machine, as that is the only format that it will use. Firehed, they have 2 fw ports so you can daisy chain them.

 

Ah that makes sense, hadn't thought of that. Easier than a FW hub I guess.

 

my dad got me the time capsule and im very impressed so easy to use

 

That's something I'd be really glad to get as a gift but would never shell out for myself. Congrats, it seems like a nice piece of kit.

 

Yeah, do you have any thoughts on it? I've convinced my parents of the value of a 24" iMac in the kitchen, so maybe a Time Capsule (or two) could be swung as well. Any arguments I could use?

 

Well, if you need all of its functions (wireless-n, gigabit ethernet, large network drive), then it doesn't really come out that expensive. It's easy to use. It's pretty much the only way to do time machine over a network (thanks apple for that one).

 

I use TM onto my Airport Disk drive; no, it's not just being thrown onto any NAS device, but to be fair most NAS drives wouldn't be usable as a TM drive due to filesystem configurations/limitations.

 

Quick note - to anyone not scared of "warranty void if broken" stickers - buy the 500gb time capsule for $299 and a good quiet western digital green power drive for $100 and swap the drives. You then have a $400 1tb time capsule that is cooler and quieter than the one from apple and you have a spare 500gb drive that you can sell off to someone else or use elsewhere.

for teh win....