Scheduling backups for 4 partitions

[Laughing Crow]

Hello,

I am going to be connecting an external drive to a Power Mac G4 which is using Mac OS X 10.4.8.

The internal drive on the Mac has been partitioned into 4 sections.

When I set up the external drive, I will make 4 partitions in it, and will backup of the 4 partitions of the Mac separately.

My question is: When I schedule the backups, since I don't know how long each Smart Update will take for each partition - should I just schedule each one for a different day of the week? Or schedule them 2 hours apart on one evening? (I'll be using Firewire 400).

I will be doing this for someone else, who is out of state, so I'm not sitting at that computer right now. I do not know the size of the data on that computer, but I did take some quick notes last time I was there. The info on the partitions was:

Partition Name Space available

Scratch ............. 63.04 GB available
Multimedia ......... 58.23 GB available
OS 10 ................ 1.4 GB available
Render ............... 107.99 GB available

I don't know if each partition was created the same size... but I am planning on using a 500 GB external drive. This was my dad's computer, who passed away, and I'm trying to assist my mother who is running the business on her own now.

Thank you.