How big should the backup partition be?

[jazzdog]

Hi,

I have an 80GB (74.41GB) Mac Mini and a 500GB external firewire drive. I'd like to create 2 partitions on the firewire drive: one for general backup and the other one for audio recording.

Should the backup partition be 80GB? Will this be sufficient or does SuperDuper need more working space than this? I'm currently using around 50GB, but often use more. If the internal drive gets very full will I need more than 80GB for the backup partition?

When I set up the partitions with Disk Utility does it matter which one is the top one? I've read that disk performance is faster on the outer area, so this is where the audio partition should be. Is the first/top partition as it's displayed in Disk Utility on the outside of the drive?

thanks

Chris

[dnanian]

Last things first: I don't know what partition is where in terms of physical layout, sorry. If you want high throughput, you should probably get a high RPM drive that's dedicated to that purpose...

As far as backup sizes go, typically the size of the volume is enough. But, if you're going to get really full and create large files, 20% on top would help Smart Update with edge cases (see the Troubleshooting section)...

[jazzdog]

It's a new 7,200 rpm Western Digital drive, that should be fine for my purposes, but I might as well set it up to work as efficiently as possible. I'll do a bit of searching around to find out about the location of the partitions.

I'm not expecting to have individual files bigger than 2 or 3 GB. If it will avoid any future problems I'll allow 75GB + 20%, so that'll be 90GB.

thanks