As part of my series on switching to the Apple iMac, here's my piece on backing up data.
I looked around for a good solution to store upwards of 300GB of data on a Firewire + USB2.0 external drive and came across the
Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition.
This drive comes in two sizes, the 600 GB version has 2 x 300 GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration and the 1 TB version has 2 x 500 GB drives that are set in RAID 0 by default but can be changed to a RAID 1 setup via the included management program that's available on the cd that comes with the package. I however did not know of the limitation on the 600 GB drive until after I purchased it. So much for redundant backups! Guess I will change to that at some other point.
The drive comes pre-formatted for Mac OS X (i.e. it has a single partition across both drives in HFS+). It was a simple plug & play job to get it working with my old Powerbook 800Mhz.
Now, the logical step would be to run
MacDrive 6 and connect up the Maxtor drive via USB 2.0 to my PC. Just my luck, this simply would not work. MacDrive never managed to detect and grant access to the Maxtor drive. So I was stuck backing up files via the network and the Powerbook. This was a few days effort of setting up a data transfer and leaving it to run while I went to work.
After giving my network (driven by a great
Linksys WRT54G running the
DD-WRT release) a nice exercise, I had a backup of all my files, for use when the iMac arrived.
Next up, setting up the iMac and transferring iTunes!
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