I have an iBook and a desk top Mac, both G4. Is the any benefit in partitioning my new My Book For Mac for the purpose of backing up both Macs? I also want to use the HD as extra storage for both machines. I have a vague memory that it is recommended to partition HDs. In this case, should I make four partitions, one for each machine’s back up and one for each machine’s data storage. At least that’s I I think was advised many years ago when ExtHDs were much smaller.
Im assuming you will be formatting the drive as HFS+ ??
If so, you dont have to partition the drive if you dont want to. You could just create a folder for each systems backup or storage files, and then map a drive on each computer to their own storage/backup areas.
Partitioning a drive helps keep things more organised for some people, and back in the day the older file systems could not copy with such large HDDs, hence why people partitioned them so they could make full use of the entire drive. Nowadays the file systems can cope fine with very large disks, so partitioning isnt really needed as much.
Its really down to personal preference, there is nothing to gain or lose from partitioning the drive.
Hi,
My passport Essential SE is not working well.
Maybe I’m doing something wrong.
I have another WD and I just plug and play, just appear a icone in my desktop, I just open and manage
all my files easy.
This new one, is not working like that.
How can I do this? Can you help me, please?
Thanx, Ifti. I don’t understand what HFS+ is. What are the “personal preference” parameters? Why would partitioning the drive be better? Is there any issue if I use an unpartitioned disk for back ups for two separate computers as well as storing data?
HFS is the file system used by the MAS operating system.
You will not have any issues if you just create the 1 partition and create separate folders for backups/data for each computer.
