Leopard & TM on 3 Macs, Thoughts Please


There's been some conflicting info and I'm a bit confused. I'd
appreciate any ideas on how to best set up my 3-Mac (wireless) network
w/ Leopard & TM. What I have now:

Airport Extreme Base Station (old one)
2 External FW drives, 120 GB ea
1 " " " 240 GB

Running 10.3.9 now:
1 Mac Quicksilver, 867 MHz w/2 120 GB HDs, one empty + 30GB iPod
1 iBook 1.2 GHz, w/60GB HD + 8 GB Nano (husband's)
Running Tiger:
1 iMac Core Duo 2, 2 GHz w/150 GB HD + iPod shuffle (daughter's)

1) Id like to install a bootable universal system on one of the drives
(probably the 240) so that I can start all the Macs with it for
maintenance purposes. Do I need to install that in a separate partition
if I also intend to put a TM folder on that volume? I'm still confused
about this. And if I have to partition that drive, then I must do it
from the Quicksilver, right?

2) I'm worried about backing up iTunes. My music will be reasonably
stable but my huge volume of podcasts changes constantly. If it backs
all that up, then I'll run out of backup space in nothing flat. Is
there a way to only backup music or is it an all or nothing deal with
iTunes?

3) I could swear I saw an Apple support doc that said you could put as
many TM folders on a volume as you wanted but now I can't find it (have
they changed their minds?) Why can't I put a bootable system folder in
the same partition as a TM folder? Will TM overwrite the folder when it
runs out of room... is that why? And if so, isn't that kind of dumb?

4) Someone here said you can only use external FW drives for TM. Why
can't secondary internal drives be used? Or can they? And whatever
drive is used, it has to be one file on a single disk... it cannot be
split over more than one disk right?

5) I'm currently running alternating incremental backups with
Retrospect and I'm not sure how to accomplish the same level of data
security with TM (though I'm dying to get rid of Retrospect). Any
thoughts on that? Thanks,

Madeleine
.

Relevant Pages

  • Backup strategy
    ... > I have a Windows2000 Pro desktop, and I created a backup job to daily ... Partition one of the drives into 4 partitions. ... in your mirror hard disk as your only hard disk to make sure that it boots ...
    (microsoft.public.win2000.general)
  • Re: Free space disappearing
    ... In the Windows Directory of your C partition you will have some Uninstall folders in your Windows folder typically: ... Right click on each folder and select Properties, General, Advanced and check the box before Compress contents to save Disk Space. ... Is System Restore set to monitor all drives? ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.perform_maintain)
  • Re: RAID, SCHMAID.......
    ... And risky to change it later without a full image backup. ... with & in the system images so I know exactly what's where & done when. ... Pity that just saving the OS partition wont do that, ... to what raid or 10K+ drives or other new drives bring to the table. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage)
  • Re: another Time Machine thread - still need SuperDuper?
    ... I was thinking of making the partition the same size as the Mac's boot ... experience with Time Machine, and someone who has a similar usage ... Machine backup looks like a complete copy of your data, ... I have two identical hard drives which I'll be using ...
    (uk.comp.sys.mac)
  • Re: Time Machine: Spit!!!
    ... didn't give me any backup options., probably because there was no Mac ... that partition down and then use DU to put a suitable one on there as ... This backup dongle onto an external drive with a suitable Mac ... (any drives attached can be backed up), but before it could be excluded. ...
    (uk.comp.sys.mac)