Back up drive-Partition or not?

[aved]

Trying to figure out what I should do. I have a PB G4 (10.4.5) with a 100GB HD which is about 90% full and just got a Lacie 300GB external HD today. I want to use the Lacie for a complete system backup and also for extra storage-I have a lot of movies. I plan on backing up my system every couple weeks but I will probably transfer the movies around quite a bit. My questions are:

-Should use 2 partitions on the Lacie? One for system and one for storage? If I use 2 should I set the system partition to exactly the same size as my internal disk, slightly larger or slightly smaller? I have never tried to recover a system from an external and am not sure how that works.

-I have also heard that partitioning an external is not wise unless you are trying to set up a dual OS disk, which I am not. Any truth to that? Either way I have ample storage for my needs and am basically looking for ease in recovery should my PB commit seppuku.

Thanks!

[jbarley]

I use an external firewire drive for my system backups.
I have 4 partitions on it, 2 are used to keep clones of my system drive, these are both bootable, 1 I use for daily incremental backups of my Home folder, and the last is for my iTunes and iPhoto libraries.
This setup works well for me.
There are several ways to select which disk to boot from,
-System Preferences-Startup Disk
-Press Option key on startup
-Use the Install CD and select Startup Drive from the top menu bar

I use SuperDuper for my Cloning, but have also used CarbonCopy (free),
both do the job well.

jb.

[aved]

Thanks for the reply jbarley. On your system backup partitions did you make them larger than the original?

[dmetzcher]

Originally Posted by aved

Thanks for the reply jbarley. On your system backup partitions did you make them larger than the original?

I do something similar to jbarley, except I only have two partitions. One is for the clone, one is for files. I have a 30 GB drive in my iBook, and I have to 30 GB partition on the external FireWire drive. You will not clone a drive and find that the space required is more than the size of the hard drive you are cloning, so, making it the same size as your drive is a more-than-safe bet.

[fryke]

I'd make it 1 MB bigger. Don't want to end up being short of a few KB or something. ... But yes, I'd partition for this task, because is cleaner if the volume is for this task only in my opinion. It's also more "tidy". But two partitions are enough. One 100.1 GB for cloning, the rest for additional data.

[jbarley]

Originally Posted by aved

Thanks for the reply jbarley. On your system backup partitions did you make them larger than the original?

The partion size for my clones is the same size as my system boot partition, this works well for me in part because the data on my boot partition is never anywhere near the max capacity of the partition.

Also the reason I keep more then 1 clone backup is because I have been in the position where the most recent clone I was trying to restore from, had the same problems that I was trying to correct.
Having an earlier clone to fall back on, plus my daily data backups made an almost complete restore possible.

jb.

[simbalala]

Originally Posted by jbarley

Having an earlier clone to fall back on, plus my daily data backups made an almost complete restore possible.

I use 2 FW drives, each partioned into two partitions. This allows for the traditional Grandfather, Father, Son backup scheme. The newest backup overwrites the oldest. So I still have versions of known good data all the time.

[aved]

Thanks ya'll