Backing up 2 drives to 1 drive

[QTI]

Would be grateful for your advice on the following.

My current (relevant) setup is as follows:

- 1 external drive with 2 x 500GB harddrive in RAID1 setup. This drive currently stores all my photos and nothing else. Out of the 500GB capacity only 250GB is in use.
- 2 internal drive with 2 x 640GB harddrive. One of them stores all my videos and nothing else. The other is used for SuperDuper! to back it up automatically at midnight. Out of the 640GB capacity only 340GB is in use.

Being a paranoid, I bought a WD Mybook Studio 1TB today, thinking that I could use it to get SuperDuper to backup both drives on it (as there are just about 600GB of files) and I will store this drive offsite and only bring it back for updating may be once or twice a month.

I thought its going to be quite straightforward but, not being a technical person, after playing around SuperDuper a bit, I am not really sure if this can be done. Reading some messages posted on this forum, it seems that it is not that straightforward? I read the User Manual and there is this section about: Storing a backup alongside other files on a destination drive. Should I do that? If yes, would the future updating backups be as quick as it currently does my internal 640GB drive?

Many thanks and your advice would be much appreciated!

[dnanian]

You should partition the new drive into two volumes, one for each source volume you want to back up. Make sure you click the "Options" button in the Partition tab of Disk Utility and select the proper partition scheme!

[QTI]

Originally Posted by dnanian

You should partition the new drive into two volumes, one for each source volume you want to back up. Make sure you click the "Options" button in the Partition tab of Disk Utility and select the proper partition scheme!

Thanks for your super quick response!

So no viable options other than partitioning the drive? Not a big problem now since my drive is new, but the downside is that I need to fix the sizes of the partitions now and I can't foresee whether one partition (photo or video) will be much more quickly filled up than the other (and don't want to spend on partitioning software)...

[dnanian]

You can use images, but I wouldn't recommend that unless you're forced to.

[has55]

what is the problem with images?

Austin

[dnanian]

They're not directly bootable and are more 'indirect' - that is, if something happens to part of the image, you tend to lose the whole thing. Whereas with a backup that's written directly to a disk, if one file is damaged the rest are usually OK.