Help me set up my backup drive... please!

I have two Macs... and old MacBook CoreDuo that is stuck at Snow Leopard and an iMac that I just upgraded to Mavericks. I also have Windows 7 installed in a Boot Camp partition on the iMac, and I usually run Windows via Parallels instead of booting into Windows directly. I had a 500GB external drive that I was using for Time Machine backups of both computers, but that drive just died and I am replacing it with a new 2TB drive. Since this drive is much larger, I would like to use it for two other purposes as well... First, I would like to use this drive to also back up my Boot Camp partition and all the windows files, hopefully in a manner in which I could easily restore the Windows system if it ever totally crashes (I have only just realized that Time Machine can't backup my Boot Camp partition and I suppose none of my Windows files either). The second new use I would like for this drive is for large music files that I may start generating with some recording software. I'm a musician and may start to dabble in some home recording.
Can you help me determine if I need more than one partition, what file system I can use, and what would be a good way to back up my Windows stuff even if I have to do it manually every so often?
Thanks!

Hey Laut!
Here's what I would do if I were you. You can partition the 2tb drive into two 1tb partitions.
1. Locate the Disk in Disk Utility.
2. Click on the Partition tab and press the + button at the bottom left. Create a new partition that is around 1tb in size.
3. Under the Partition tab, format your new partition in exFAT. This filesystem is compatible with both operating systems for read/write.
4. The original partition will be Mac OS Extended (Journaled), leave this how it is.
This will allow you to set up your Time Machine backups on your Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition, and then you can use your exFAT partition to store media and manual backups of your Boot Camp partiton that can be accessed by both operating systems.

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HELP - problems setting up External Hard Drive to Time machine

Hi
I set up Time Machine about a month ago. I had an additional 250GB USB External Hard Drive connected but it was not included in the back up. I think that at the time I had been told that I could add the files from the 250GB external to the back-up Time Machine disk later.
Also, before I set up Time Machine on the new 1TB USB drive, I partitioned the drive, and I think as I was deciding how to partition it, I used the Erase utility to reset the drive. I don't know if that is relevant.
Time Machine has been working fine with my internal drive - well I haven't needed to restore anything with it, so I don't really know.
However, I have tried to add the 250GB drive to Time Machine, and in Preferences->Options, the 250GB drive is greyed out in the 'Do no back up' list. And the - (minus) box is also greyed out so nothing happens when clicking on it.
I tried to sort this out a couple of weeks ago, and someone helpful on the forum advised me:
"to move the file /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist to the desktop. then go to system preferences->Time machine and set up time machine again. the exclusion list will be empty and you can add what you want to it. "
I tried this a number of times and each time I struggled to set it up again. When moving the .plist file I was always asked whether to keep or replace. I tried both, sometimes the file would come back into the folder, sometimes not.
The 250 GB drive was still on the list of 'Do Not Back Up the following drives". After one occasion recently on my attempts, the system did not recognize time machine.
I'm really stuck here - both my drives are ridiculously low in space.
Please help,
Thanks
Steve

What is it you are trying to do? Do you want to change the backup drive from the one you have been using to another drive? That's all you can do. If you have a drive set up as the TM backup drive, you cannot designate another drive as the backup drive unless you disable the existing backup drive. TM cannot backup to more than one drive at a time, and TM cannot span backups across multiple drives.
To move any device out of the Exclude list simply select it then click on the [-] button to remove it from the list.
To prepare a new drive as the backup drive you must partition the drive GUID or APM depending upon whether your computer is Intel or PPC, respectively, and the formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) See the following:
Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Set the number of partitions from the dropdown menu (use 1 partition unless you wish to make more.) Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (only required for Intel Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the volume(s) mount on the Desktop.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
Steps 4-6 are optional but should be used on a drive that has never been formatted before, if the format type is not Mac OS Extended, if the partition scheme has been changed, or if a different operating system (not OS X) has been installed on the drive.

Help with User account on seperate drive please...

Hello... need a little help please...
I'm running 10.5.6. My boot drive is the fast, 64GB outer partition of a 5th drive on my MacPro. I used the Advanced Options in the Account pref pane in Leopard to move my Home Directory to an ultrafast 4 drive internal RAID. So far, so good.
In the past (before this bifurcated system) when I hit the road (I'm a photographer) I would just clone my boot drive which contained my User account to the MBP and go.
However now my System and User accounts are on seperate drives. I cloned the system to the MBP, but when I tried booting, it said it was unable to continue as it couldnt find the User Account. This is understandable as the User account was pointed to another drive, but the boot sequence didnt even give me a choice to create a new user account, or point the system to an existing user account on the MBP.
Seems I've got two choices. Either figure out a way to clone my System and my Home directory to the MBP, and have them recognize each other. Or give up this experiment and bring my Home directory back onto the boot drive.
Of course I could just keep a seperate system on the MBP, but find it much easier to clone the entire thing over from the MP with all my apps, settings, etc.
I'm not a UNIX junkie, but can follow instructions for using the terminal.
Can someone shed some light on this for me?
Thank you !!!!

I don't keep large files in my Home Directory. They live in another partition on the fast RAID.
But I do have lots of little ones. I'm now thinking that this is too much hassle for the small speed gain.
I'll move my home directory back to the boot drive and symlink folders if needed.
Thank you both.

Help with setting up External hard Drive?

Hi,
I bought an 80GB External hard Drive and have just plugged it into my MacBook Pro. It lights up and I can hear the Hard Drive running in it's case, but I cannot move any files on my desktop into the External hard Drive icon. A message keeps coming up that the External HD cannot be modified. I've tried going to Disk utility to repair the Hard Drive but no options are highlighted when I select the 'New Volume' External Hard Drive.
Is there a way to set this up on my MacBook Pro?
Thanks in Advance.

Got it sorted, i went into Disk Utility again and went to erase. I erased the disk using the OS Extended (Journaled) option and it worked.

Help me setting up sound... please? [SOLVED]

Hello there. First of all I want to say that Arch Linux is awesome. I've been using it for some time now and can do most of the things I'd like to do - except for setting up sound. In fact, I have no idea of how to accomplish this. Would someone mind pointing me in the right direction? I've tried searching the forums and using the wiki, but I've yet to be able to do anything useful. Or anything at all. Also, I don't know what sound card I've got at the moment, so I'm not even sure it'll work, so any instructions on how to find this out would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Last edited by Kaerigan (2009-01-23 17:36:33)

Have you read this?
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ALSA
That should lead you in the right direction.
The gist of it is:
# pacman -Sy alsa-lib alsa-utils alsa-oss
# alsaconf
# gpasswd -a USERNAME audio
# alsactl store
---add alsa to your rc.conf file under daemons
That should work.. =]

Backup drive invisible

I had set my TM backup drive to be invisible using Time Machine Scheduler. Everything was working fine until I booted from the Leopard install disk and did a verify and repair of the backup drive. After that the drive would could not be used by TM any more. I deselected it in the TM "Choose Backup Disk" window to see if reselecting it would fix the problem. But the disk would no longer show up in the "Choose Backup Disk" list of available disks. (Presumably because its invisibility bit was set.) I have tried to make the disk visible by using sudo SetFile -a v /Volumes/myBackupDisk but I get the errors "ERROR: File Not Found. (-43) on file: myBackupDisk" or "Write Permissions Error. (61)" The disk shows up in Disk Utility but repair disk option for it is disabled (grayed out). The disk shows up in /Volumes.
Every time I reboot the machine fsck launches and attempts to repair the disk (but apparently never thinks it has succeeded or is unable to write the flag indicating it has done so).
I hate to erase the disk because it has months of backup data on it.
It is a pair of 500Gb drives in a FW800 external enclosure set up as a 1Tb raid.
Any ideas on how to resurrect it?

Hello?
Is anybody out there....

Need help to find photo's on my backup drive,since installing Mountain Lion cannot find where they are stored.The backups after ML install are greyed out except in Applications, MyFiles and Devices really welcome a hand with this please.

I need help to find my photo's please (2500) on my backup drive.Lost them after doing a clean install of Mountan Lion I have tried to find them but had no luck. I use Time Machine with a 1TB Western Digital usb drive. Thanking anyone in anticipation of a solution.

-Reece,
We only have 1 single domain, 1 domain forest, no subdomains, only alias. I had replied to the other post as well. But I am happy to paste it here in case anyone want to read it.
So, after a few months of testing, capture and sending logs back and forth to Apple Engineers, we found out there is a setting in AD, under User Account that prevent us to log into AD from Mountain Lion. If you would go to your AD server, open up a user account properties, then go to Account tab, the "Do not require Kerberos preauthentication" option is checked. As soon as I uncheck that option, immediately I was able to log into AD on the Mac client. Apple engineers copied all my AD settings and setup a test environment on their end and match exact mine AD environment. They was able to reproduce this issue.
The bad part about this is... our environment required the "Do not require Kerberos preauthentication" is checked in AD, in order for our users to login into some of our Unix and Linux services. Which mean that it is impossible for us to remove that check mark because most, if not all of them some way or another require to login into applications that run on Unix and Linux. Apple is working to see if they can come up with a fix. Apparently, no one has report this issue except us. I believe most of you out there don't have that check mark checked in your environment... Anyone out there have any suggestion to by pass or have a work around for this?

I had to restore my iPod because I forgot the password, like how santa forgot about me. And I didn't set up a Backup. SO I sort of lost everything. But I'm wondering if I can somehow get my pictures back from somewhere. PLEASE HELP ME. Thanks

I had to restore my iPod because I forgot the password, like how santa forgot about me. And I didn't set up a Backup. SO I sort of lost everything. But I'm wondering if I can somehow get my pictures back from somewhere. PLEASE HELP ME. Thanks

- If you used PhotoStream then try getting some of them from your PhotoStream. See that topic of:
iOS: Importing personal photos and videos from iOS devices to your computer
- Maybe from the restored iPod via
How to perform iPad recovery for photos, videos
Wondershare Dr.Fone for iOS: iPhone Data Recovery - Wondershare Official
http://www.amacsoft.com/ipod-data-recovery.html

I am facing wifi and mobile 2G signal issue after upgrading to IOS 6 from IOS 5 in IPhone 3GS. Please help, restoring setting even didn't helped.

I am facing wifi and mobile 2G signal issue after upgrading to IOS 6 from IOS 5 in IPhone 3GS. The mobile carrier signal as well as WIFI suddenly drops zero and are then restored automatically. Sometimes i cannot conenct to WIFI even standing infront of WIFI router. Please help, restoring setting even didn't helped.

Update: my phone's connecting to the WiFi again. I don't know what did the trick. I did nothing since reinstalling the software. It hadn't worked then, it is now. I tried connecting to my dad's phone's hotspot( he uses a Moto G), and it worked. I then tried connecting to the WiFi at a friend's house, and when I came back home, my phone was able to connect to my WiFi! Is it of any significance that my friend's router doesn't require a password? My issue has been resolved( for now; I hope I'm not counting my chickens before they've hatched). For anyone facing a similar issue, I suggest you try everything I did:
1. Turn your router off for a minimum of 30 seconds, turn it back on and try connecting.
2. Click on the WiFi network you are connected to, scroll to the bottom, tap "Renew Lease".
3. Do a soft and hard reset.
4. Reset network settings.
5. Back your data up, erase all content from settings menu, restore from backup.
6. Reinstall your software( put it in recovery mode).
I am not sure which of the above worked for me. Make sure you try everything. If none of the above works, take it to a genius bar or an authorised service provider. Good luck! :)

I can't copy files to External Hard Drive : Please help..

Evening,
I've just bought a Macbook and am just getting to grips with it. This is my first question on this forum...the first of many no doubt.
Problem I've got is that I can copy file's from an external hard drive on to the MAC but I can't go back the other way and copy file's from the MAC on to the external hard drive - it says 'New Folder cannot be modified'.
When I go into 'Ownership and Permission' of the external hard drive it says I can read only.
The Hard Drive is a Octigen USB 2.0 drive if that helps..
Any ideas?
Thanks for your help
R
Macbook Mac OS X (10.4.8)
Macbook Mac OS X (10.4.8)

How confident are you that MacFuse/ntfs-3g is a reliable option for ordinary humans? It is at version 0.2.2, not long out of beta, the FAQ mentions slow write performance and other rough edges (possibly fixed in the current version), and this is a comment by the author as of 1/11/07:
"Small disclaimer: Please note that MacFUSE is a complex piece of software, and it is a work in progress. We believe in releasing early and often, so we're releasing it now so that the community can help us to make it more robust."
I have no need for it whatsoever, but if I did, I would have concerns about using it for a backup drive.

Help! Can't find photos on backup drive

A while ago my Ibook died. I had everything backed up to an external drive. And I know the photos were there, now everytime I go to that drive all that I can see when I open the Iphoto library on the backup drive are the pictures that are in my current MacBook Iphoto library. I know the other photos were there, I saw them before. What am I doing wrong. PLEASE HELP!

You're trashing an already damaged library:
Try these in order - from best option on down...
1. Do you have an up-to-date back up? If so, try copy the library6.iphoto file from the back up to the iPhoto Library (Right Click -> Show Package Contents) allowing it to overwrite the damaged file.
2. Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. This will create a new library based on data in the albumdata.xml file. Not everything will be brought over - no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your albums back.
3. If neither of these work then you'll need to create and populate a new library.
To create and populate a new library:
Note this will give you a working library with the same Events and pictures as before, however, you will lose your albums, keywords, modified versions, books, calendars etc.
In the iPhoto Preferences -> Events Uncheck the box at 'Imported Items from the Finder'
Move the iPhoto Library to the desktop
Launch iPhoto. It will ask if you wish to create a new Library. Say Yes.
Go into the iPhoto Library (Right Click -> Show Package Contents) on your desktop and find the Originals folder. From the Originals folder drag the individual Event Folders to the iPhoto Window and it will recreate them in the new library.
When you're sure all is well you can delete the iPhoto Library on your desktop.
In the future, in addition to your usual back up routine, you might like to make a copy of the library6.iPhoto file whenever you have made changes to the library as protection against database corruption.
Regards
TD

I recently bought a WD My Book Live to backup using Time Machine, now that I've upgraded to and my old NAS won't support Mountain Lion. The WD drive appears in the Finder, it doesn't appear as an option when setting up the backup disc in Time Machine.

I recently bought a WD My Book Live to backup using Time Machine, now that I've upgraded to and my old NAS won't support Mountain Lion. The WD drive appears in the Finder, but it doesn't appear as an option when setting up the backup disc in Time Machine. Any ideas please?

" now that I've upgraded to and my old NAS won't support Mountain Lion. "
Do you have a few words missing in the original question ?.
When i upgraded from LION to MOUNTAIN LION it made NO difference at all to my MyBook Live !!!
reading the original post again and again, do you in fact have two My Book Live units, an old one and a new one ?
tim

I need help choosing the 'right' backup drive(s)

I have a MacBook Pro on which I do mainly video editing. I make DVDs of my family and real estate stuff which I then want to offload from the laptop to my external hard drive. For the purpose of backing up this laptop, I will probably run the backup on an adhoc basis (after I complete a video editing process). By the way I use iMovie 09.
Now, I also have a MacG5 which contains work data (mainly pdfs of contracts for real estate, etc). On this machine, I wish to do a somewhat regular backup. Please excuse information I am leaving out - - this is where you folks can help me.
My question(s) are:
- Should I buy two separate backup devices to be more efficient?
- Are there any brands or specifications I should consider over others (Firewire vs USB)?
I am a novice in this domain and any suggestions or clarification are greatly appreciated!
Thanks!

fredfromhuntington beach wrote:
Thanks again for the reply (from some time ago!). I hope to get a reply from you based on my following simplification of how I intend to use my backup. No...I haven't moved forward on my decision of what/how to conduct my backups!
1) I prefer to use a single backup device for each computer
2) I would like to be able to create DVDs of movies, and (if time becomes an issue) do a backup of the DVD
How would you modify your suggestion(s) to me based on these changes?
Thanks!
OK, were I starting from scratch, I would go with the docking station from the OWC link. (I think the price has actually come down $20 since my original post! Man, I love pricing on electronics stuff!) You can easily move it from one computer to another and bare drives are cheaper to purchase and easier to store. If you want a full-time device for each computer, I would probably still recommend the docking station, especially with the price falling like it is.
IMHO, the best storage solution for bare drives is this box from Wiebe Tech, which is sturdy ESD plastic and nearly as compact as the 3.5 inch drive. My backups rotate through a safe deposit box that can hold a bunch of them, though I usually have only two offsite at any one time.
For DVD backups, I have in the past imaged DVDs using Disk Utility, which works out nicely, especially when I need to burn more copies. And you can just mount the image of a video DVD and DVD player comes up and you can watch from the hard drive.

Already have wireless network, need help for set up of time capsule for wired backup only.

Hello all -
I have a time capsule that plugs into wall and used a wireless network to back up computer. It would always mess up internet afterwards so I would unplug the time capsule and reset internet until the next back up. my time capsule now will not link into my computer. It just flashes amber. Spoke with apple and was told to come on here and ask for help for setting up time capsule for a wired backup only and to mention that I have a wireless network.
Hope any of this makes sense.
Thank You!!

Spoke with apple and was told to come on here and ask for help
Really? The paid professionals at Apple told you to post on a forum where users.....just like you....are trying to answer questions? We'll try to help, though.
For starters, please tell us the make and model of the modem/router that you have now that is providing your wireless network.

I need help with setting up time machine for backup

I would like help with setting up time machine for backup.

You will need an external hard drive (formatted for a Mac).
Then you plug it in and go to system preferences>time machine and select the external HD and turn it on.
The backups are automatic.
Barry

Help me set up my backup drive... please!

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