• bloc said on Jan 20, 2008....

  i just did a clean install on my laptop on friday. I bought a big external drive and dumped my home folder onto it. This is probably easier on the mac because everything I need is in my home folder and most applications can be installed by dragging them into the applications folder. All the settings for my major apps (browser, mail, etc) are synched with my .mac account (not free) so I get all my settings back with the click of a button.
  
  After the clean install I can grab whatever I need off the external drive if I need it. All of my work (i.e. code) is in version control repositories so that helps a lot too.
  
  I highly recommend this approach. Just get a big drive and dump your hard drive onto it.
  

• silverwhisper said on Jan 20, 2008....

  my last boss was a fan of creating a virtual partition onto which he would put all his data, leaving only apps and the OS on the c: partition. moving my docs to that partition shouldn't be difficult, IIRC.
  
  mirroring the c: partition from time to time would probably be a good idea.
  
  ed

• TinSoldier said on Jan 20, 2008....

  bloc: Yeah, I wish I had a Mac. Plus I think they they have a new backup program, don't they?
  
  ed: I actually don't really know how to do that. I'll have to look it up. I also don't really know how to mirror my C:\ partition.
  
  I'm still in the backup process right now, I've run into a few stumbling blocks.
  
  My main drive is a 120GB SATA drive. But I had partitioned 40GB for Linux the last time that I set it up. But I don't use that. Plus, I found that using virtualization software such as VirtualBox was much easier than maintaining a dual boot system. Of course, that was after I discovered that NTLDR was a much better boot manager than was Grub.
  
  Not that I was running out of space, but waste not want not.
  
  My second drive is a 20GB IDE Western Digital that I had from my previous computer. I really didn't use it for much. My initial plan was to have it formatted as FAT32 and use it as a shared file area for Linux and Windows.
  
  However, Linux now supports NTFS much better than before.
  
  Anyway, I installed Windows Backup and I waded through the docs that I needed to backup. My "shared" account was definitely the largest. In fact, it was almost the capacity of the second drive -- 20GB. Then I found out (more like the computer reminded me) that FAT32 cannot accept files larger than 4GB.
  
  So I had to reformat the drive to NTFS and try again. And I weeded out a bit more cruft.
  
  About an hour later it was done, but the whole drive was almost full and I still had a few gigs left to backup!
  
  So I back up that data to my existing drive so that I can burn it to a DVD later. Unfortunately, even after paring it down, it's still over 2GB and my DVD burning software (Nero) doesn't like that. So currently I'm using 7Zip to compress that file down and hopefully it will all work out.
  
  To make a short story long, I decided to check the internets.
  

• bloc said on Jan 20, 2008....

  i'm telling you, but an external drive and just dump it on there. A 500 gig drive is about $150. I spend $150 over a day of headaches!
  

• TinSoldier said on Jan 20, 2008....

  Yeah, but I only do this every year or two.
  
  Now I'm over half way done. Windows is reinstalled and updates are installing as I speak. Erm. Type.
  
  I can't really afford $150. Well, maybe but there are many other things that I need to spend that money on.
  
  More later.
  
  
  

• bloc said on Jan 21, 2008....

  the mac backup program you mentioned is called time machine. It's nice for simple backups (i.e. you aren't doing offsite stuff)

• kelly said on Feb 06, 2008....

  Don't forget Time Capsule!  I'm getting one!  Time Capsule is a wireless access point with a large (500GB or 1TB) drive built in that will back up your Mac wirelessly every night.  Plus you get 802.11n speed.  It's not Mac exclusive.  You can connect to it with Windows (or Linux I'm sure) as well.
  
  
  Oh, and extra points to Tin for using the esoteric and highly satisfying word "cruft."

• bloc said on Feb 06, 2008....

  i'm debating if I want to get one of those. Do you know if you can connect a printer like you can one of the other mac airports? At the end of the day a firewire harddrive is cheaper than the time capsule. Not sure what I gain from the time capsule.

• kelly said on Feb 07, 2008....

  Yes, you can connect a printer.  The thing I'll gain is that I can set my wife's computer up to backup to the same drive.  Plus the fun factor of wireless mounted hard drives is a consideration for me.  Plus I'd get to upgrade from the 802.11b Airport I have now.
  
  
  I do have one concern and that is I'd like to be able to connect to it with a wire to use Carbon Copy Cloner to retrieve in the even of a drive failure.  I'm not sure I can do that even though it does have a USB port to add another drive.  I can't remember if target mode works through USB.

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