Backing up iBook and PC using same external hard drive.

I need some assistance. I have to send my iBook back to Apple to repair the wiring for the monitor-it fried and no back light. It was recommended I back it up before I send it in so I bought an external hard drive. It is large enough to handle both my PC desk top and laptop and the iBook. Will there be a problem putting both systems on the external or should I partition the external to hold the mac seperatly. I specifically need to back up my iPhoto (2400 photos) and my documents until I get it back. I use MS Office so I can go back and forth between the PC and Mac for work. But my main intent is to use the external for all three computers.
Thanks,
Wendy

Unless any file is larger than 4GB, FAT32 (MS-DOS) formatting will allow both the PC and the Mac to read/write files to the external drive.
iFelix

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Using same external hard drive with two Macs

I use two Lacie external hard drives and Time Machine to back-up my iMac, swapping over the drives each week to have one off-site.
I am soon to buy a MacBook. Can I use the same external hard drives for the MacBook's Time Machine back-ups, whilst continuing to use them with the iMac, or will that cause problems?
Thank you.

As Kappy says, Time Machine will put both sets of backups in the same Backups.backupdb folder. That may not be a good idea for the future; your best bet may be to partition the drive.
See #4 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.

I was trying to back up my mac by using my external hard drive. Without realizing it, time machine erased all my backups from my other computers. Is there any way to recover these files? I can't even get the external hard drive to work on my pc.

I was trying to use my external hard drive to back up my mac computer. It had files on it from my pc computer. Time machine erased all my existing files. (I thought it was only going to erase the duplicate files and rewrite them). Is there anyway to recover these files from my external hard drive. My mac has renamed the hard drive time maching and it will no longer show up on my pc. What can I do?

Yes, the Old Master file has a folder for each year where I find all photos from that specific year. I am attaching a screen shot of the file.
In the meantime i have managed to download all photos (it did not download any video files though in mpg, avi, 3gp, m4v,mp4 and mov format) to a new iphoto library. Unfortunately the photos are quite mixed and often doubled up. I ma considering to purchase iphoto library which checks all duplicates in iphoto. this will save me a lot of time. What do you think?

Original files and catalog on same external hard drive?

I am about to install Lightroom 3. I have read alot about creating catalogs. In order to get ready for the installation I am organizing all my photos in folders by year and putting them on ONE external hard drive. This requires a lot of effort to copy them from many different locations: a second external hard drive and from the desktop of my computer hard drive. I am on a Mac running Snow Leopard. Is it a good idea or doesn't it matter or is is wrong to have all my photos and the one catalog I will create on the same hard drive. What I'm asking is: should the catalog AND the original files be on the same hard drive or doesn't it matter. Thanks.

I am about to install Lightroom 3. I have read alot about creating catalogs. In order to get ready for the installation I am organizing all my photos in folders by year and putting them on ONE external hard drive.
Completely unnecessary, but if it makes you happy, go ahead.
If your photos come from a digital camera (and not a scanner), then Lightroom will give you the ability to find photos by years the instant your photos are imported into Lightroom. You don't have to do the work to put the photos into year folders or other year structures.
What I'm asking is: should the catalog AND the original files be on the same hard drive or doesn't it matter.
Doesn't matter. Catalog can be on any connected hard drive, photos can be on the same drive or different drives (plural), connected or disconnected.
Advice: don't organize via folders. I think this is a sub-optimal use of your time. Folders should be used as storage locations, and are not organizational tools any more (they were organizational tools before you had Lightroom). Set up your folders however your want to meet your storage needs (so if you really want all your photos on one drive — a good idea in many but not all cases — then do that to meet your storage needs) but don't use folders any more to achieve organization/searchability/"easy to find". Use keywords and metadata inside of Lightroom to achieve organization/searchability/"easy to find".

Back up photos and video directly to external hard drive?

I need to back up my photos and video from my iPhone 3GS to my external hard drive, not iPhoto on my Mac because I don't have much space left on my computer. I really can't back up to my computer and then transfer it all to the hard drive. Is there a way to do this? If so, could you please be specific with directions and settings? Greatly appreciated!

No.
Photos and videos in your iPhone's camera roll must be imported by an application on your computer as with any other digital camera.
If your computer's hard drive is that low on available storage capacity, you need to move other data to an external hard drive.
You can store your iTunes library and your iPhoto library on an external drive along with any data that you don't access very often. You computer's hats drive should have about 10% free.
Or invest in a new internal drive with much greater storage capacity.

How do I back up iPhone and apps to an external hard drive?

Hi -
I have a very small internal hard drive in my good ol' G4, so I have my iTunes music library on a 160 GB external (I'm backing the library up to a second external).
I have such limited space on my internal that I want to back up my iPhone and my wife's iPhone to the 160 external, but I can't seem to figure out how. All the apps land in Users > (myaccount) > Music > iTunes > Mobile Applications. I'm familiar with the iTunes Preferences > Advanced function where you change the location of your music library, but I haven't been able to get this to work for iPhone apps.
Also, when I back up my wife's phone, any applications that I've downloaded directly to my phone and then later backed up are being loaded into her phone. How do I prevent this?
Thanks a lot for some help.

You can just copy the app files in the folder where they are stored and move them over.
If apps you downloaded are getting put on your wife's iPhone then it sounds like you only have one iTunes account for both of you. With your wife's iPhone connected go to the application tab and uncheck apps she doesn't want.

If I were to drag and drop files from an OSX 9 onto an external hard drive (1 TB), assuming there is still plenty of space left, will I be able to use this same external hard drive to back up my iMac (Mountain Lion)?

If I were to drag and drop files from an OSX 9 onto an external hard drive (1 TB), assuming there is still plenty of space left, will I be able to use this same external hard drive to back up my iMac (Mountain Lion)? And would it ask me if I want to initialize (thus erasing it) or eject the hard drive like the OSX 9 did?

I was trying to follow this thread because I was curious about the OS 9 installation - until I realized you have another thread going about the very same subject, albeit with a different subject line.
FWIW: it is best not to double post - things get far too confusing after a while.
@ Kappy (in case you hadn't seen the other one):
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5054178?tstart=0

HT201250 I use Time Machine to back up my entire computer with my external hard drive. I am getting a brand new iMac this month and was wondering what is the process of using this back up to restore my new computer exactly how my old computer was?

I use Time Machine to back up my entire computer with my external hard drive. I am getting a brand new iMac this month and was wondering what is the process of using this back up to restore my new computer exactly how my old computer was? I want to make sure I will still have various important files on my new computer, like my songs in iTunes, my photos in iPhoto, etc, etc. Thanks so much in advance!

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
When you turn on the new iMac for the first time, Setup Assistant will ask you to restore a backup, so connect the external disk and follow steps to restore all your files to your new iMac. Your new Mac will have the same settings and programs as your old computer.
In other cases, I would recommend to restore the whole backup without using Migration Assistant or Setup Assistant, but a Late 2012 iMac uses a special OS X build, so the OS X version that you're using on your old Mac won't work on the new one. For more information, see > http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html

I just backed up my mac to an external hard drive using Time Machine. What would happen if I turn Time Machine off and then plug the external hard drive back into my computer?

I just backed up my mac to an external hard drive using Time Machine. What would happen if I turn Time Machine off and then plug the external hard drive back into my computer?
What I am ultimately wanting to do is make more room on my computer by backing up all of my files onto the external hard drive and then deleting them off of my computer. However, neededing to be able to retrieve them from the external hard drive later down the road.
From what I have read and am trying to understand, is that I probably shouldn't have used time machine. I need to use the external hard drive like a basic flash drive where I can put things on and get things off without having it automatically update through time machine everytime I connect it to my computer.
Not tech savvy at all and barely understand basics. I need very simple and easy to understand explanations.

sydababy wrote:
and then deleting them off of my computer.
BIG BIG MISTAKE ..... youre making a linchpin deathtrap for your data trying to shove everything on a single fragile HD.
Dont suffer the tragedy other people make, buy another or 2 more HD, theyre cheap as dust.
The number of people who have experienced terror by having a single external HD backup is enormous. One failure that WILL HAPPEN, and kaput,......all gone!
Dont do it, its all about redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
follow here:
Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection
Deleting them off your computer is fine....having only ONE copy is extremely BAD.
The Tragedy that will be, the tragedy that never should be
Always presume correctly that your data is priceless and takes a very long time to create and often is irreplaceable. Always presume accurately that hard drives are extremely cheap, and you have no excuse not to have multiple redundant copies of your data copied on hard drives and squirreled away several places, lockboxes, safes, fireboxes, offsite and otherwise.
Hard drives aren't prone to failure…hard drives are guaranteed to fail (the very same is true of SSD). Hard drives dont die when aged, hard drives die at any age, and peak in death when young and slowly increase in risk as they age.
Never practice at any time for any reason the false premise and unreal sense of security in thinking your data is safe on any single external hard drive. This is never the case and has proven to be the single most common horrible tragedy of data loss that exists.
Many 100s of millions of hours of lost work and data are lost each year due to this single common false security. This is an unnatural disaster that can avoid by making all data redundant and then redundant again. If you let a $60 additional redundant hard drive and 3 hours of copying stand between you and years of work, then you've made a fundamental mistake countless 1000s of people each year have come to regret.

Can I use the same external hard drive for time machine and storing other files

I have a 640GB external hard drive that I have been using for over a year for time machine backups. My mac hard drive is now starting to fill up and I am looking to move audio, video and picture files to my external hard drive. How do I do this without messing up my time machine backups? Can I do both on the same external hard drive? Do I just make new folders on the external hard drive to move the files I want? Thanks for the help.

If you move the files you will need to get another disk to back the files up to. You don't want to have only one copy of certain files (personal, professional etc.).

HT1284 Can I back up my Mac and my pc to the same external hard drive? If so, could you explain how? Thanks.

Can I back up my Mac and my pc to the same external hard drive? If so, could you explain how? Thanks. I am a new user with mountain lion.

You could partition the drive into 2 partitions. One formatted as HFS+ for Mac OS X back, and one formatted as NTFS for Windows backup.
You would have to move the drive from system to system to do your backups. If there are 2 systems, I would suggest just getting separate drives for each, unless they are both laptops, then you will be disconnecting the drives all the time anyway.
Unless Windows is running in a virtual machine on your Mac. Then a partitioned drive would be fine.

Every time I try to back up my Macbook Pro with an external hard drive using Time Machine, I receive the error of "the disk does not have enough space". I have a 500GB hard drive and only 120GB Macbook. It worked fine before the latest Maverick's

Every time I try to back up my Macbook Pro with an external hard drive using Time Machine, I receive the error of "the disk does not have enough space". I have a 500GB external hard drive and only 120GB Macbook. It worked fine before the latest Maverick's update. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

My guess would be it has created an entirely new backup of your drive when you upgraded to Mavericks.
See Here: http://pondini.org/TM/1.html
And here: http://pondini.org/TM/9.html
Peruse the whole site. There is a lot of information there.

How do you remove back up data from the memory storage? my storage data states that i have over 80gb of data used for back ups and i dont know why as i use a external hard drive as a time machine .now my 250gb flash storage is nearly full

how do you remove back up data from the memory storage? my storage data states that i have over 80gb of data used for back ups and i dont know why as i use a external hard drive as a time machine .now my 250gb flash storage is nearly full.. HELP!

When Time Machine backs up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of recently deleted files. The space occupied by local snapshots is reported as available by the Finder, and should be considered as such. In the Storage display of System Information, local snapshots are shown as Backups. The snapshots are automatically deleted when they expire or when free space falls below a certain level. You ordinarily don't need to, and should not, delete local snapshots yourself. If you followed bad advice to disable local snapshots by running a shell command, you may have ended up with a lot of data in the Other category. Ask for instructions in that case.
See this support article for some simple ways to free up storage space.

I have an Apple Macbook and will be backing up the entire system to an external hard drive utilizing the Time Machine application. when I am doing this, will the data on the external drive that I am using be erased?

I have an Apple Macbook and will be backing up the entire system in order to upgrade to a newer OS. I will be using an external hard drive to do this and there is already data on it. To complete the backup, i will be using the Time Machine application. Does this application wipe out all of the existing data on the external hard drive, or will it create a new "folder" for the backup?
thank you

No, but as steve359 states you should use a dedicated hard drive for backups. It you need a temporary backup then you can use the drive provided it has sufficient space for all your data on the hard drive.
When Time Machine finds that the drive has data on it already it may decide to erase the drive before continuing, which is another reason to use a dedicated drive.

I'm need to sell my MacBook and need to back up all my files includingn itunes will I be able to do so using an external hard drive?

I'm need to sell my MacBook and need to back up all my files including itunes will I be able to do so using an external hard drive?

To copy your current hard drive I like the free application Carbon Copy Cloner. It makes a bootable copy of everything on your hard drive http://www.bombich.com/index.html Check that it's set up right by booting up from the external drive.

Backing up iBook and PC using same external hard drive.

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