Apple Back up hard drive

Discussion in 'Software' started by Guest-18698, 2 Jun 2008.

  1. Guest-18698

    Guest-18698 Guest

    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
     
  2. M4RTIN

    M4RTIN What's a Dremel?

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    as long as you reformat the hdd with disk utility you can use any you like afaik
     
  3. -=ice=-

    -=ice=- Minimodder

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    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
     
  4. Guest-18698

    Guest-18698 Guest

    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
     
  5. Firehed

    Firehed Why not? I own a domain to match.

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    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. :rolleyes:
     
  6. NoahFuLing

    NoahFuLing What's a Dremel?

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    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! :naughty:
     
  7. Dizman

    Dizman What's a Dremel?

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    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.
     
  8. Firehed

    Firehed Why not? I own a domain to match.

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    Ah that makes sense, hadn't thought of that. Easier than a FW hub I guess.
     
  9. Guest-18698

    Guest-18698 Guest

    my dad got me the time capsule and im very impressed :) so easy to use
     
  10. Dizman

    Dizman What's a Dremel?

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    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.
     
  11. NoahFuLing

    NoahFuLing What's a Dremel?

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    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? :p
     
  12. Dizman

    Dizman What's a Dremel?

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    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).
     
  13. Firehed

    Firehed Why not? I own a domain to match.

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    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.
     
  14. DreamTheEndless

    DreamTheEndless Gravity hates Bacon

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    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....
     
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