Help with backing up...

Hey all, i'm going to be exchanging my MBP 13" Intel Dual Core 2 2.4Ghz tomorrow for the new i5 13" (30 day money back guarantee even if opened, tomorrow is the last day!) and I really want to just back it up and transfer everything as smoothly as possible. I've got no external drive to use for Time Machine but I do have a White MacBook, a laptop PC and a stationary PC. What's my best option? Or none of the above? Am i right that connecting my MBP to a PC as a target disk via Firewire will only allow me to read and not write data? And that even if i could write, i'd need to format the disk on the PC to use it with a Mac? Can i save a Time Machine backup on a partition on the White Macbook? if so, how do i connect the two? USB? Or is my best bet to just copy the files i've managed to work with in the last 29 days and re-install all the software on the 2011 MBP (assuming all goes as planned)
Thanks in advance...

If you put the white MacBook into FireWire Target Disk Mode (assuming it's one of the MacBooks that have FireWire ports) and then connect it to the MBP with a FireWire cable, you will be able to reformat the MacBook's hard drive with Disk Utility and use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to make a clone of your MBP's drive onto it. Setup Assistant will then enable you to migrate everything over from the clone exactly as if it were the original MBP drive. You will, of course, lose everything that is currently on the MacBook's drive; that drive must be large enough to hold a clone of the MBP's drive; and obviously you must have a suitable FireWire cable. If any of those conditions isn't met or isn't acceptable, this option won't be an option.
As for backing up to a PC's drive, don't even think about it unless you can remove the drive from the PC, connect it as an external drive to the MBP, reformat it as a Mac OS Extended drive, and clone to it as described above. If you can't do that with what you have at hand, you have no option but burning your 29 days of files to CDs or DVDs and manually copying them to the new machine when you get it, sacrificing the more obscure user preferences and data that are buried in the MBP's system.
Message was edited by: eww

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Welcome to the discussions,
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[Edited for type face improvement at precisely 12:55:09 PM on Monday, June 15, 2009, PDT]

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Alright, thank you for taking the time to read all that. Thanks for the help!
-dmillerwhite

1. Unless you've told iTunes not to copy music you've added to the iTunes library, backing this folder up will back up your entire iTunes library. If applicable, deauthorize the machine before restoring the computer.
2. This will work with music purchased from the iTunes store, when the computer is authorized to play music purchased from the iTunes store account used to purchase that music. It will not work with music you've gotten from CDs or other sources.
3. Yes.
(16907)

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http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/2116/screenshot20110211at848.png
my external does not get recognized by my laptop unless i use disk utility and click repair. after about 10 minutes of it 'repairing,' it says i have to delete everything off of it and reformat it. it has 40 GB of information and i only have 3 GB left on my computer. talk about yikes.
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angsavestheday wrote:
to back up data. my external was formatted so i could use it on both windows and mac.
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You might be able to partition the drive, so one partition is +Mac OS Extended (Journaled),+ and the other is MS-DOS (FAT) or ExFAT, which both Macs and PCs can read and write, but that's not a particularly good idea, either.
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