External HD for both Mac and PC backup

[Ruahrc]

Santa delivered to me over Christamas a 200GB USB external HD. Yay

Anyways what I want to do with this device is create a backup for my two computers: a Windows XP PC and an Apple Powerbook G4.

My XP PC has a 120GB HD in it, formatted NTFS.
My Powerbook has a 60GB HD in it, formatted in OS X (HFS+ I think is the technical term).

Since the sum of my two computers' storage is 180GB, I figured I would use the last 20GB as "long-term temporary" storage (a scratchpad for files, if you will).

Anyways I am having trouble setting it up the way I want. Basically in an ideal world I envision 3 partitions on my external HD:
1) 120GB NTFS partition for my XP backup
2) 60GB HFS+ partition for my PB backup
3) 20GB FAT32 partition for misc. files
(The 20GB Partition needs to be FAT32 so both OS X and XP can read and write to it natively)

Obviously I can't create a partition for HFS+ on XP, but I can create windows partitions in OS X. The problem is that I can't seem to be able to mix the two. If I try to make one partition in OS X a Windows partition, it forces me to make all my partitions windows.

Does anyone know of a solution to this? Do I have to physically separate the Macintosh partitions from the Windows ones on a separate HD?

Lastly, please recommend to me some good backup software? For OS X, there are freely available utilities that can be used to make complete, bootable disk images. For Windows, however, my new external drive (It's a Maxtor) didn't seem to come with any backup software. I would be willing to pay a reasonable sum for some software so long as it's good, but if there are free ones that's even better. I don't need fancy software with quick restores, or scheduling, or any of that stuff. In fact all I want is for the software to make a complete and bootable image of my existing partitions. Basically what I will do is simply connect the external drive say once a month and completely re-image my two computers' hard disks onto the backup. Then back it goes into storage.

Thanks for any tips or help getting this backup scheme set up!

Ruahrc

[sechs]

I'd suggest that partitioning the drive would be counter to your purpose. FAT32 is fine for both operating systems to use to store disk images.

While I use Ghost on my PC, something as simple as Linux's dd command should work on both platforms; you just need appropriate boot CDs. I'm not aware of any disk imaging software for MacOS, although one would hope it exists.

You should carefully consider archiving your back-ups to a more stable medium, like DVD, every once in a while. Although the possibility of a double hardware failure isn't too high, the probability of user error is great.

[Ruahrc]

Thanks for the reply but I am a little confused. How would partitioning my drive be counter to my purposes? In my view, the only way to back up 2 different sources onto the same drive is by using different partitions? Indeed FAT32 is a solution in theory but there are some drawbacks. First of all it is not the most efficient usage of disk space given the cluster size of NTFS is different than FAT32. So my 120GB partition on my external HD would be more full than my 120GB NTFS internal partition. More importantly, however, Apple's HFS+ allows for more freedom in filenames than windows. Most of the "illegal" characters not allowed in Windows are valid in HFS+. I worry that backing up my entire Apple HD onto a FAT32 drive would bring up the possibility of errors such as these, possibly rendering any backup useless.

Disk imaging software does exist for OS X, and in fact the free offerings (CarbonCopyCloner is most popular I think) are very good and for my purposes will be sufficient. It is on windows that I need suggestions for backup software.

Lastly I'm a little confused about the DVD backups? In my eyes, optical media such as DVDs or CDR would be the less stable medium? I have been backing up to hard disks for years, and even have data on hard disks that are down in the 200MB capacity range, and have never had a problem. Also factor in that this external drive spends the vast majority of its life inactive and not plugged in, I feel that the stability of the hard drive (both data-wise and mechanically) are nothing I need to worry about.

I admit I have not followed recordable technology very closely lately and my opinions were largely formed in the early days of CDR. Are optical media more stable now? However even DVD backing up is not a very practical solution for me at the moment. Currently my XP hard disk has about 60GB on it, which would be a major pain to back up on to optical media. In the past I have used internal hard disks as backups (and had them repay me ten times back when I had to make use of them!) but I can't install a second HD into my laptop and my XP PC is a Shuttle mini-case with no 2nd HD in it. So this time I opted for an external drive as a backup. I should mention, however, that I also run periodic (i.e. bi-weekly or so) backups of my documents and other important files onto my iPod, so really I will have 3 copies of the most critical data floating around at all times.

Again thanks for the help, but I think I am confused about the suggestions you offered?

Ruahrc

[sechs]

Both Windows and MacOS read and write FAT. There's little reason to use something else. If you're going to storing disk images on the disk, then the file system doesn't see the information that you're backing-up in the images. This will limit the size of your disk image files (Ghost breaks them up automatically) and what names you can use, but that's relatively minor.

I use Symantec Ghost to make images of Windows PCs. There are other products, however. Be wary of any system which supposedly can image a disk while you're using it; it's simply not possible to get a static image.

Concerning optical disks... consider that hard drives are orders of magnitude more complicated and, therefore, far more likely to fail. You can expect optical media to last from 20 to 100 years; you might be lucky if a harddrive goes for five. Don't confuse your personal experience with the reality of the world at large. You're several times more likely to die while in a car than while in an airplane, but nearly all people place driving as the safer way to travel.

I would suggest making your regular images to your external drive, and then running one of the backups a couple times a year to optical disk. It's time consuming, but the reliability and ability to keep archives is invaluble.

[Ruahrc]

Oh ok I think I understsand clearer now. Yes you're right using a FAT partition would not matter if I were copying disk images. I apologize, I was explaining it wrong! I don't plan on first "packing" my drives into image files, I just want direct partition-to-partition copies of my drives onto the backup. So theoretically I could plug the drive into my computer and browse the files on my backups. Now that we're (hopefully) on the same page, how do you think I should proceed?

I might consider doing optical media for my powerbook, as that is the computer on which I actually use for "work". My PC is purely a gaming (more specifically, flight-simming ) machine, and making optical backup of that is not necessary. Thank god too since 60GB is a lot of DVDs!

Ruahrc

[sechs]

I would not suggest doing that. Any disk image program worth its salt will allow you to view and extract files from images, which pretty much eliminates that as an excuse. Furthurmore, it requires you to do this voodoo with partitioning and file systems, which increases the possibility of an error, and consumes time and effort. Since disk images have metadata, they are less prone to errors and corruption.

If you just want a copy of your files, then don't beat around the bush. Just copy your files.

[Ruahrc]

For the record: I did find a solution to my problem. There are command-line utlities in OS X (Or rather I'd say they were inherited from its UNIX base) which allowed for multiple partions and multiple formats. Directions were found here:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...30613121738812

I was able to successfully partition and format the HD's in the manner that I wanted, and was able to mount, read to, and write to the "common" FAT32 partition that I made on each platform. I had to stop there though as I found I needed a firewire HD to make it bootable from my macintosh. So I had to return the drive and will get a firewire one (or maybe dual-option FW/USB) instead.

Ruahrc