Pls help! What sort of Mac back up drive?

cmacneil

Hi all -

I'm looking for a recommendation for an external hard drive for a Mac G4. I'm looking for something at least 500 gig around the £70 price point.

I'd like to use Time Machine to do one full backup and clear off some media files from the machine to free up some local space. I'd then want to do incremental backups. Ideally I'd like to keep the media files in iTunes.

I had previously bought a Lacie Internet Space on the shop's recommendation that it would suit the Vista and Leopard machines on my network, but subsequently found out that it's not compatible with Time Machine.

Any suggestions of products, or especially good sales right now?

Chris

Marty_J

Any external HDD will work just fine with Time Machine. Stick to well known brands and you'll be fine; I've never had any trouble with Western Digital HDDs. If you want to use it for Time Machine and media storage, partition it in two and then just point Time Machine to one of the partitions. You can save space, create more backups, and make your backups faster by excluding system files from being backed up; I just back up the documents in my home folder. However, doing it this way means that you can't totally restore your system from a Time Machine backup if you ever reinstall OS X. I don't mind doing a fresh install of everything, so as long as I have my documents backed up I'm happy.

Whatever you do, make sure you get an external HDD that has FireWire.

kendalls_cave

I use the Freecom 320GB ToughDrive 5400RPM USB2 with my macbook and it's great in case you drop it

cmacneil

These are great tips, thanks guys.

Can either one of those devices be networked? Ideally, I'd like to connect it to my BT home hub wi-fi router.