Mac-mini and CCC

[LeChuck]

I have a mid-2012 Mac-mini with a 500 GB hard drive. I have purchased an external 2 TB drive, which I would like to use as a backup drive (including a bootable drive). I want to use Carbon Copy Cloner.

I would like to know if I should partition the external drive.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hi,

Are you only going to use the external HD for CCC?

C

 

[LeChuck]

Do you want to know if I want to use the external drive only for CCC? No, I want to use the external drive also for intermediate storage of other data, which I want separate from the backups.

 

[Cory Cooper]

OK, thanks. Yes, you could partition the drive to keep them separated. Maybe a 500 GB partition for the CCC backup (same size as your mini's HD), and the rest for other storage. I have a drive setup like that myself.

C

 

[LeChuck]

I was going to make the partition for the backups about 600 GB. However, with Disk Utility the only options for partitioning the drive were equally-sized partitions, so I made two 1 TB partitions. The cloning went well. Not sure if I overlooked an option for creating, for example, one 600 GB and one 1400 GB partition.

EDIT: I just found out that it's possible to create partitions of unequal size:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2551465?start=0&tstart=0

 

[Cory Cooper]

So, I assume your issue is resolved?

C

 

[LeChuck]

Indeed, I did find out how to partition the drive. However, I have run into another issue that concerns the difference between ejecting a drive, partition or disk image with the Finder versus doing the same with the Disk Utility. I'm afraid a new post is in order.