Backing up multiple computers to one drive
 

First of thanks, maybe this isn't the place but i just wanted to say i really love SD-thanks for all your hard work!

I have a 300 GB drive that i was about to partition so that i can back up 2 computers an imac G5 (powerpc) and a macbook (intel). Is it possible to format partitions on the same drive differently (GUID and Apple)? If so, how? Or am i asking the wrong question?

Stated another way: I would love to be able have 2 bootable partitions (one intel based and on powerpc based) on the same drive using SD.

thanks for any help!

You'll need to use "Apple Partition Map" to partition if you want to do this; note that Leopard really does not want you to do this with an Intel Mac, though... it's probably better, in 10.5. and later, to use separate drives.

So if I were to have 3 x 1TB FireWire drives connected to my server.

Both RAID'd together to form 3TB worth of accumulative data storage.

Then have the 3TB Drive Partitioned into:

2 x 750Gb (GUID for Intel Mac)
2 x 250Gb (Apple P Map for PowerPC Mac)
4 x 120Gb (GUID for two Intel Mac Laptops)
1 x 80Gb (GUID for Intel Server)

As you may or may not be able to tell, I have 5 Macs here. I'd like to have two backups of each. One SD! Clone, and one Time Machine.

Could this idea be Achievable do you think?

Do I even need to do a full backup clone using SD?
Could Time Machine suffice enough as a Backup (is it bootable / fully restorable in the case of total data loss on the Mac?)

Thanks,
-Van

I don't think you can partition a RAIDed drive, Van... and you certainly can't use different partition schemes on a single drive... you'd need to use sparse images.

Ok, Sparse Images are fine then. I thought about not using them, because of the load it takes to mount a large sparse disk image before anything can be actually done with it.

The reason I wanted to partition is because of all the different drives sizes not fitting together very neatly.

Still, do you think an SD! Backup and a Time Machine backup at the same time are worth while? Can both be used to fully backup and restore a system?

I do think redundancy is a good thing, and the two applications are good at different things as well. Of course, without having a bootable backup (due to the RAID), you lose out on a significant advantage of SD.

So if I was to put SD!'s backups in Sparse images, would that get around the Partition type problem?

Yes, but as I said, you lose out on a significant advantage: namely, you can't boot from the backup until it's restored.

Well, that's not too bad.

I could have one Dedicated GUID Drive to backup and have bootable volumes on there for say, the laptops and server.

But for the bigger, desktop machines, which are a mix of PowerPC and Intel i'll have Sparse Disk Images, as there's no Partition Map to supporting the boot-ability of either type of mac.

Well, you can use Apple Partition Map, but as I said, Leopard strongly discourages users from doing this (unfortunately).

Dave

You have said the same thing here two or three times very recently. Could you explain/state just what this "discouraging" from Leopard entails? How is it manifested? I think (but am not sure, running from Tiger just now) that Disk Utility under Leopard still says of the APM option, " ... or to use the disk as a non-startup disk with any Mac."

I guess my question is, is the discouragement in a help file somewhere, or does Leopard shall we say "actively" resist doing this?

Two obvious things:

- You can't install Leopard to a drive that's partitioned as "APM" on an Intel Mac, which makes archive-and-installs difficult.

- If the drive is partitioned as APM, you can't select it in the Startup Disk preference pane.

Thanks. Sure, I see #1 now. Hadn't really focused on that. Number two I was/am well familiar with.