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External disk for Mac Leopard Time Machine?

johnastovall

Deceased, but remembered fondly here...
I've got my MacBook Pro running Leopard and want to start using Time Machine. It's a 250GB disk. I've been thinking about either a 1TB Western Digital My-Book or the LeCie Neil Poulton 1TB drive.

Suggestions?

Also any issues with not using Time Machine all the time? I don't want to carry it with me on trips.
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
I've got my MacBook Pro running Leopard and want to start using Time Machine. It's a 250GB disk. I've been thinking about either a 1TB Western Digital My-Book or the LeCie Neil Poulton 1TB drive.

Suggestions?

Also any issues with not using Time Machine all the time? I don't want to carry it with me on trips.
I prefer to buy bare WD or Seagate SATA drives and fit them into high-quality FW400/800/USB 2/eSATA compatible enclosures from Macally or Other World Computing, rather than buying complete external drive packages with included enclosures. It doesn't really make much difference, though ... I prefer the flexibility and reliability of a reusable enclosure where most of the packaged drives are a genuine pain to take apart if you want to swap in a different bare drive.

The system doesn't care if you are not connected with Time Machine. Time Machine will alert you that you're backup is overdue if you've gone beyond a week without it running.

I specifically exclude my Lightroom catalogs directory tree from Time Machine. Since the Lightroom previews are dynamically generated and SQLlite is not particularly happy to be doing operations when something else is trying to read/write its files, this prevents any IO collisions. (Working around this, I set directory on my system to be where Lightroom backs up the catalog every day, so Time Machine picks up the last state of the catalog for me every day to fall back on if something crashes while I'm editing.)
 

johnastovall

Deceased, but remembered fondly here...
Thanks the OWC enclosures look the way to go a 1TB WD Black Caviar in one of their Mercury Elite enclosure.

In fact they seem to have some nice raid solutions for the Mac Pro...
 

Dale Allyn

New member
I have a few of the Mercury Elite AL Pro enclosures and I'm quite happy with them as well.

For portables (2.5") I have a few mini Xpress drive enclosures that I have filled will various drives.
 
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