Partitioning

[jar5173]

Can you partition internal hard-drives, if so, would it be a good idea to partition my hard-drive and use it with Time Machine?

 

[pooker]

Yes you can partition internal hard drives, but let me ask you this question why are you wanting to partition it?

 

[mayorredbeard]

He said he wants to use it w/ Time Machine which is software for apple that allows you to backup data.

Yes it would be a good idea to store the backup information on a separate partition. This way should the main partition become infected with a virus, files damaged, or data somehow become corrupt, the data on the other partition is more likely to remain unaffected.

 

[jar5173]

So this is a decent idea? I realize that internals run slower than any decent external, and it would probably end up backing up constantly. I think when you set up Time Machine, it wants to back up hourly, and then erase everything from a day and back up for the entire day, and then after a month it erases all the days and makes one month. <-- or something like that.

The only bad thing is, Time Machine writes these files to my partitioned internal HD at like 5-10mb/s. So It isn't going to finish backing them up in one hour (it will be due for another backup every hour.) I just bought the Mac wireless external which is said to be capable of 200+mb/s. I guess well see.

 

[mayorredbeard]

So this is a decent idea? I realize that internals run slower than any decent external, and it would probably end up backing up constantly. I think when you set up Time Machine, it wants to back up hourly, and then erase everything from a day and back up for the entire day, and then after a month it erases all the days and makes one month. <-- or something like that.

The only bad thing is, Time Machine writes these files to my partitioned internal HD at like 5-10mb/s. So It isn't going to finish backing them up in one hour (it will be due for another backup every hour.) I just bought the Mac wireless external which is said to be capable of 200+mb/s. I guess well see.

I own a Mac but have never used the Time Machine software. I looked it up and that is correct, it backups every hour, and this is not configurable. But after some research i found the following:

For the initial backup, Time Machine copies the entire contents of the computer to your backup drive. It copies every file exactly (without compression), skipping caches and other files that aren't required to restore your Mac to its original state. Following the initial backup, Time Machine makes only incremental backups — copying just the files that have changed since the previous backup. Time Machine creates links to any unchanged files, so when you travel back in time you see the entire contents of your Mac on a given day.

So its not re-writing all the files, merely keeping track of what files were changed at what time. So the backup should not take too long.

 

[jar5173]

Thanks a lot, I really appreciate that post, I partitioned 40 or so GB to try to do this initial backup, and when I saw how slow it was going I just decided to wait until my external HD comes. Thats great to know though. Thanks.

 

[blackjack]

Backing up stuff on a partitioned drive is slow, what are you backing up? I see you have a mac so is it just software or your OS? I partitioned my 40gb HDD and made a 10gb backup drive which contained some ghost images of my OS, it was very useful even when the transfer rate was slow, I found it much better to add another internal HDD as data transfer was 10 times faster, I don't know much about macs but could you have added another internal drive or did you not want to?

 

[jar5173]

Yah, external HDDs usually write at like 50-300mbs/s but internals are much slower. Time Machine is an Apple App that was designed to backup all of your files on your primary HD. It backs up every hour, each time only updating things that have changed. It shortcuts all of the stuff that doesn't change so that it doesn't have to write them over and over again. It also allows you to look back to any date, and bring files to the present that you have deleted, or whatever. I have seen mixed reviews, but I will be the judge of it. I gave up on the idea of using a partition of my Primary HD, and will wait until the end of the week for my wireless 1tb apple External to arrive, I will then post my feelings on the Time Machine software.