External Hard Drive requirements needed?

Hello. I'm very new to Mac...I have an external hard drive from my PC and was wondering what the requirements are to run TimeMachine...I realize that I would have delete everything on the hard drive if I wish to use it. It is a Maxtor. Thank you.

The size of the TM backup disk should be 2 to 3 times the amount of data you expect to back up. That will leave plenty of room for incremental backups.
The disk will have to be reformatted with the Mac HFS+ (Journaled) file system. Disk Utility is the tool to use for that.

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Does an external hard drive ALWAYS need to be connected to my mbp with retina display for Time Machine?

Does an external hard drive ALWAYS need to be connected to my mbp (OS 10.10.1) with retina display for Time Machine? Or can it be connected once a week or whenever I want? I used to have an external drive always connected to my previous mbp, but it made moving my mbp around a bit of a hassle with it connected...

When the backup drive is not connected, some of the free space on the internal drive will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of recently deleted files. Local snapshots will protect you from unintended file deletions, but not from a drive failure. You should only go as long between backups as you're willing to lose data. If losing a week's worth of work is acceptable to you, then that backup frequency is OK. Otherwise, it isn't.

I am looking to back up my MAC, and I need to know how big of an external hard drive I need

I am looking to back up my MAC, and I need to know how big of an external hard drive I need. How do I determine this?

Well, they recommend at least 2 - 3 times the size of your hard drive if you are using Time Machine because that keeps making backups until it runs out of space (and then deletes the oldest to make room for the newest).
However, if you prefer to have a bootable clone as a backup, you need about the same size as your hard drive since it is a perfect copy of your system (unless you want to partition and keep an older clone separately).
So, check to see how large your hard drive is and go from there.

Time machine external hard drive requires repair every time I turned the computer off or after I ejected the external hard drive?

Time machine external hard drive requires repair every time I turned the computer off or after I ejected the external hard drive?

What kind of repair?

I have a Firewire 800 external hard drive and need to connect to my new MacBook Air. Where can I get the correct cable?

I have a Firewire 800 external hard drive and need to connect to my new MacBook Air. Where can I get the correct cable?

Apple has announced a Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter, but not yet given a release date.

I have a western digital external hard drive that needs to be re formatted for use on my but iMac but I do not want to lose existing data

I have a Western Digital external hard drive that needs to be re formatted for use on my iMac, but I do not want to lose existing data, is this possible ?

Formatting a disk always erases all the data on it. Your only option is to back it up elsewhere and restore it once formatted.

Why do my two external hard drives require "ejection" prior to shutdown?

Why do my two external hard drives require "ejection" upon shutdown?

Problem solved. I had plugged in my external hard drives into a USB card. I switched my two printers to the USB card and plugged in the two hard drives into the computer's USB outlets and now NO improper eject messages. What a relief!!! Thanks again.

Time Machine says both of my external hard drives require reformatting to case insensitive. What do I do?

I have been successfuly using Time Machine to back my iMac to an external hard drive (via usb) and everything has been fine for the last year. I have been using TM to back up to a HD called Terra LaCie via usb.
A week ago, my iMac hard drive was full--so I spulrged and bought a 6 TB external hard drive (Western Digital My Book-Thunderbolt). I set up the new Thunderbold HD to use RAID 1 (mirror) and copied most of my iMac hard drive over to the Thunderbolt HD.
I kept my working photographs (most recent) on my iMac and felt good to know my older photographs are on my new Thunderbolt hard drive.
For a few days, Time Machine seemed to work fine (backing up my iMac to Terra LaCie HD. I haven't been concerned with backing up the Thunderbolt drive (as I feel that mirroring is same as backing up).
Yesterday, Time Machine indicated the lastest back-up failed (for the HD called Terra LaCie). Now, when I go into Time Machine, the dialog box indicates the following message:
"Are you sure you want to erase the backup disk “Terra Lacie”? Erasing will destroy all information on the disk and can’t be undone.
The disk must be erased before it can be used for Time Machine backups because a disk you are backing up is case sensitive, but the backup disk is not."
When I open Time Machine to look at my external hard drives (I also have a third usb portable drive); two of the three drives indicate the following:
"reformat required; case insensitive disk".
The small, portable hard drive (that I'm also using) doesn't say it needs to be reformated (but my new Thunderbolt and my old usb HD both indicate the same message (above).
What should I do? I just spent days transferring my photographs from my iMac to my new Thunderbolt. Should I just not use Time Machine any longer and work from my Thunderbolt drive?
Am I to understand that my iMac suddenly become case sensitive? Sorry if this was too much information about my hard-ware set-up.
Any help someone can provide me would be greatly appreciated. I suppose I need to understand Time Machine and perhaps my Thunderbolt better.

Hi BDAqua,
Bravo, you helped me solve my problem.
The Case Sensitive Disk was the small portable hard drive that I was using termporarily.
I just disconnected it and I started TM machine and everything seems to be working just fine.
Thank you very much!!!!

External Hard Drive requirements

Hi,
I'm looking to purchase an external hard drive and was wondering if it needs to have certain requirements to make it work with video and graphics... basically i'll use it to save my work done on FCStudio... any information is more than welcome...
thanks...

Next time try to be more specific with regard to what format you are editing.
Reason being that if you are editing DV or HDV even a FW400 could do FW 800 even better especially if you are dealing with less compressed HD formats (DVCPRO HD to start from the bottom).
eSATA is a good choice if you are editing ProRes, uncompressed SD/HD etc
Anyways, here some useful links:
http://www.caldigit.com/S2VRDuo.asp
http://www.caldigit.com/products.asp
http://www.dulcesystems.com/html/products.html
http://www.g-technology.com/Products/Products.cfm

IPhoto Library moved to External Hard Drive and need help moving library

Hi - Recently I had my hard drive replaced. I purchased Disk Warrior and moved all files to my external hard drive. Now that my hard drive has been replaced, I'm having trouble moving all my photos back to iPhoto. Nearly all of my 8K+ photos are blurry after I import and enlarge. The ones that are fine have dimensions of or more than 1K x 1K. The digital photos that I moved and are blurry when enlarged are 340x360 (hundreds range). How can I correct?
Thanks so much in advance.
Audra

I think I might need to back up ---- So I had a failing hard drive, went to Apple and purchased Disk Warrior. Installed Disk Warrior and tried to recover everything from my hard drive. Then all that was recovered was supposedly moved to my external hard drive. I have now received my computer back with the new hard drive. I plug in my external hard drive and have been trying to move all my images from the external hard drive to iphoto. In both places (external HD and when the photos are imported), the image is at the lower dimensions.
Thanks for your time.

FCPX external hard drive advice needed

I have on order the following iMac which will be used for video editing with FCPX.
3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
16GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM-2X8GB (upping to 32mb when it arrives)
3TB Fusion Drive
NVIDIAGeFrc GTX 680MX 2G GDDR5
I'm coming from an older Mac Pro with internal hard drives, so I need some advice from the video editing experts on a quality external hard drive for the new iMac. Any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

You've waited a long time...
Here's the deal: Thunderbolt has a bandwidth of 10Gb/s... TB2 a bandwidth of 20Gb/s. The G Raid uses 2 disk drives with 7200 RPM platters. These drives are the bottleneck and about the fastest transfers you can expect are in the 250MB/s range... I get that (and better) with a single SSD in a USB 3 enclosure. Three or more drives would get better transfer rates; you would need a larger enclosure.
You have to ask yourself: Do I want storage or do I want speed?
To make the best use of Thunderbolt speed, you can build your own RAID with an enclosure and buy the drives (matched) separately. A Thunderbolt enclosure with SSD drives will make the best use of the bandwidth provided by TB. You can find 4-bay enclosures and SSDs up to 960GB. You can expect transfer rates of over a gigabyte/second (I'm looking an an Akitio 4-bay enclosure with an advertised speed of 1375MB/s... [ customer reviews ] -- I am not affiliated with this product in any way... I think you'll get even more info here. )
Hope you find the info useful.

How to save Flip video files to external hard drive (and need new vid camera rec)?

I am trying to back up my Flip videos from my MacBook OS X 10.5.8 on to my external hard drive. They will not drop & drag directly from the flipshare software and I did locate all the mp4 files in my finder under "All Videos" where I think I can copy them over but they are not organized by title or anything and I only want to back up the clips I've edited and the movies I've created, not all the raw footage.
I'm wondering if I'm going to have to import all of these files into iMovie in order to do this in a way that will be helpful? that seems like it will take forever since *I think* you have to do them one at a time and I have almost 2 years of footage of my kids...Is there a quick way to import video into iMovie?
Side bar, anyone know of a good video camera that is small & easy like Flip but not part of a phone? My flip has died & since Cisco is abandoning the brand, I need something new.
Thank you!

I am trying to back up my Flip videos from my MacBook OS X 10.5.8 on to my external hard drive. They will not drop & drag directly from the flipshare software and I did locate all the mp4 files in my finder under "All Videos" where I think I can copy them over but they are not organized by title or anything and I only want to back up the clips I've edited and the movies I've created, not all the raw footage.
I'm wondering if I'm going to have to import all of these files into iMovie in order to do this in a way that will be helpful? that seems like it will take forever since *I think* you have to do them one at a time and I have almost 2 years of footage of my kids...Is there a quick way to import video into iMovie?
Side bar, anyone know of a good video camera that is small & easy like Flip but not part of a phone? My flip has died & since Cisco is abandoning the brand, I need something new.
Thank you!

I have a CS6 Disc I purchased. It does not seem to fit correctly in my external hard drive so I can download the software. Is a special kind of external hard drive required. I have a MAC Book Pro Yosemite version.

I recently purchased an Adobe Creative Suite 6 Design & Web Premium software so I could use a more updated version of Photoshop & Illustrator. My new Mac Book Pro does not have an internal hard drive. I was told by Apple to buy an external hard drive to download the software. I bought an LG Ultra Slim Portable DVD Writer compatible for MAC. When I went to put the disc in the drive it does not seem to fit in the tray properly. Is there a special size external drive I need to purchase to do this? Please help if you know the answer. Thank you.

Hi Bluedrake
Please download the CS6 Trials from below link : Download Adobe CS6 Trials: Direct Links (no Assistant or Manager) | ProDesignTools
Follow the instructions to Start your Download ...
Use your Serial Key to Activate them ....

Relocated iPhoto to external hard drive - now need to delete old library.

I have relocated my iPhoto library to my external hard drive. I did this due to space issues on my internal hard drive. Now I need to delete my iPhoto library on my internal hard drive to give me more memory. What is the best, easiest, and safest way to delete? Thank you so much!

Before you delete anything:
1.) Make sure the drive you put your library on is Mac OS formatted. Click on the drive icon and go to File > Get Info and check the "Format". If it isn't Mac formatted, reformat the drive and re-copy the library over.
2.) Tell iPhoto to look at your library on the external drive to make sure it has all the pictures you want. Hold down option key and launch iPhoto and choose the library on the external drive to see within it.
3.) Do you have a backup? I have my library on an external drive like you do. I have another external drive that backs up my computer and the drive with the library on it. External drives are relatively inexpensive (You can also backup using DVDs although if you have a large library it might take quite a few disks.)
__You will see it said over and over here on the discussion boards. If you have information that is important to you, have a backup.
<hr>
To Delete your library:
In the Dock (long strip of icons at the bottom of the computer screen) click on the Finder icon.
Look in the sidebar on the left hand side of the resulting window. You will see the Home.
__Inside the Home go to the folder called "Pictures". Drag the iPhoto Library from the Pictures folder to the trash and empty the trash.
Hope that helps.

400GB of photos. Want to backup to external hard drive. Need help. Not very computer savvy. Thanks

I have 400 GB of photos in iPhoto and simply want to back them up. I have a 1TB external hard drive and am wondering what is the simplest way to do this. Can I save the photos to the External Drive and them delete them from iPhoto? I need to free up space on the internal drive. Thanks

You can use Time Machine to backup, that does not mean that you can delete photos from iPhoto to save space however.
Plug the drive into your Mac and turn Time Machine on, that is all you need to do as far as backup is concerned.
You will need a second drive for your iPhoto library if you wish to keep access to all photo's, all of the time.

External Hard Drive requirements needed?

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