Moving Music to an External Drive -- Do I Need to Partition?

[jamesmcnee]

I’ve been using SuperDuper for a while and am very happy with it.

I’m planning to change the way my drives are set up and need some advice.

I have an internal 160 gig hard drive on my G5 iMac and two external 250 gig drives – one on my desk and one I keep in the far end of the house. Right now I use SuperDuper to back up my internal drive every morning to the desk external. Then once a week I pull out the other external and back up to it. So I have my internal, a bootable clone no more than a day old on my desk and a back up back up in the basement.

Now …

My internal drive is almost full and the culprit is my music – my iTunes library is about 100 gigs. I’m planning to point iTunes to use the music on the desk exteral and then erase the library from my internal. (Just in case I’m going to burn a set of back up DVDs and keep all that music off site).

If I remove the music from my internal drive and then run the Smart Update to the external will it freak out that the music is no longer on the source drive?

Am I better to partition the externals so I have a “music” partition and an “everything else” that would be a clone of my internal. And if I do is there an easy way to schedule my weekly back up – external to external – or do I have to tell it to back up the music partition to the other music partition and then the everything else to the other everything else?

At this point my head starts to spin and I give up ☺

Any advice and suggestions would be most appreciated.

[dnanian]

You should definitely partition so you can store the music on the separate music partition (or get a totally different drive for it), then make sure you're backing both up. Remember that it's a good idea to have physical redundancy, so don't back up a drive on a different partition on the same physical device...