18 July 2008 96 views 6 Comments  Email This Post

The memory of my last (and only) Mac crash (logicboard failed) is still very vivid in my mind. Therefor, I have become a passionate back-upper: not just once a month or two, no: TimeMachine, the great Leopard feature, makes backups of my important data every hour and with SuperDuper! I clone my complete hard drive to an external fire wire drive (note to self: do that more often!).

The thing is: The drive for my TM backup holds 500GB, but TM is not near to using that up. So, at least 300GB are just idling around. At the same time, I want to backup all my precious iTunes purchases. Currently, they are residing on a separate external drive in my iTunes library. And I have my purchases backed up on DVDs. 

But we all now that the life span of DVDs is not that terrific and having the data on an additional hard drive would ease my mind quite a bit. First I thought about backing up to my ISP, but I only have 10GB of online storage and that just isn’t enough. MobileMe, the Apple online service, offers 20GB, but to be honest: I have tried this service now for a year and though it has helped me out once a lot (I had accidentally deleted my final thesis and could restore it from there - that was pre-Leopard and TM), I am not happy with the service. It’s terribly slow and costs about 70 Euros a year. Nah. I also considered other online backup services like Mozy and such, but none of them really appealed to me. (Though I would be grateful if you could share your experiences if you use such a service.)

By now, I was eyeing my TM drive and it was (figuratively) staring back at me anxiously. It could probably read my thoughts: How about partitioning that drive! Only thing holding me back: it had about 80GB worth of backups that I didn’t want to delete, but was too lazy to copy to another drive right now. It would take forever.

To my immense surprise I discovered that Leopard is capable of partitioning drives without re-formatting them! In my DiskUtility, I picked my Time Machine drive, selected the “Partition” tab, clicked the small “+” sign and voilà, I had two partitions! I dragged the divider a little up and down until I had selected 200GB for my new “Manual Backup” partition and then had my Mac create the partition. (Of course, if you have really valuable data on a drive, you should make a backup first. There’s always something that can go wrong.)

About three minutes later, my drive was partitioned and I fired up some Automator Scripts to copy my data.

BTW, I know the wizards can do the same thing with the help of the terminal, but I guess for the rest of us this option is pretty awesome.