External Harddrive (for Mac)

[Solai]

I know external hard drives are a dime a dozen nowadays, but before making a purchase I had to check in with the hive mind.

Usually my approach is goto Cnet, get to the category that I am interested in and weigh editor’s reviews, combined with reader’s reviews combined with price to determine what I purchase.

I have a 320 gig HD on the Mac, so that is the minimum I need for my backup.

At first blush it looks like the Seagate Freeagent it is the frontrunner. Any thots out there one way or the other?

[Chuck]

One thot: If possible, grab a much larger drive as Time Machine will keep more incremental backups for you – giving you more options to restore.

[Pike]

What Chuck said. You can get some pretty huge external HDDs these days for not a lot of cash.

[Solai]

One thot: If possible, grab a much larger drive as Time Machine will keep more incremental backups for you – giving you more options to restore.

Interesting. Do you mean by incremental backups that I would be able to essentially go back to a point in time and perform a restore ignoring all file changes? I think of incremental backups as only updating files that have changed to the newest version. I believe you are saying that Mac will save ALL copies of the files by their creation/modification date.

What Chuck said. You can get some pretty huge external HDDs these days for not a lot of cash.

I tend to shy away from getting the biggest baddest HD out there as I am paying a premium for space I essentially will never use…or by the time I get close to it I need a new computer.

[Chuck]

Check out the Apple feature page on Time Machine for details:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html

And in this case, bleeding edge is 2 TB. (No, really.) You can get an external 1 TB for between $90 and $150 depending on how pretty you want the case to look. (Performance doesn’t really matter much if you’re just going to use it as a time machine drive.)

[Boxytheboxed]

Check out the Apple feature page on Time Machine for details:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html

And in this case, bleeding edge is 2 TB. (No, really.) You can get an external 1 TB for between $90 and $150 depending on how pretty you want the case to look. (Performance doesn’t really matter much if you’re just going to use it as a time machine drive.)

Pretty much this is all you need. I don’t know if it would be useful, but the Boxy family is a Mac only household, and I back-up all my files wirelessly and the Time Machine organizes it according to harddrives. I can also access files on other comps that have saved files on the Time Machine…or so I have been told.

[Phil]

I bought a 320 gig hard drive for my 160 gig MacBook and even partitioned it so 260/60 so that I could access part of the hard drive when I boot up in Windows. That works fine for me. The only thing I would have changed is getting a hard drive with a firewire port. There are only 2 USB ports on the computer and with an external mouse, Ipod, flashdrive etc. it can get a bit crowded.