External Hard Drive question

You need to use your Delorean to get the full benefits of "time machine".

Okay, that link didn't even work.  Thanks though.  

btw, there's no way I can get 88 jigowatts of power out of my mac mini.  

Maybe if you overclocked the processor, you could get enough power.

Hows this:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427

My wife and I actually already had that screen open, but it just doesn't answer our question.

We're pretty basic folks.  We've got home movies and pics that have basically filled up our mac's hard drive, so we got the external hard drive to store these things.  Once we know they are safely stored in the external hard drive, we'd like to burn copies of the most important ones to disc, and delete the less important ones that are on our Mac's regular hard drive (since there would be copies available on the external hard drive).  

I do appreciate the help, thanks.

So time machine is the built in mac backup.  Any time you plug in an external hard drive it will try to use it to backup your machine, but the backups are temporary in the sense that once the time machine fills up it will overwrite the oldest backup.

For example on my mac I've got a 1TB external HDD with just time machine backup and it has backups going back to the end of January.  Next month the latest backup will be February, etc...

So it's good for recovery, but if you're looking to permanently offload files to your hard drive you don't want to use time machine to do it.  You just want to plug it in and copy things over to it like a thumb drive.

You can still copy files to the hard drive outside of time machine, but time machine pretty much takes over the whole drive and will whack your other files.  I lost a bunch of video's due to this when I needed to free up some space.

Thanks for the advice Tony (and everyone!).  That last bit about not solely relying on Time Machine sounds very helpful.  Thanks again!

One other thing is if you decide to just use it as a pure external hard drive dragging files over to it, you may want to format it using exFat so you can go back and forth between windows and mac's.  If you format it with the native mac file system it won't be readable by windows.

To change the format you run "Disk Utility" on the mac, select your external drive and click on erase. On the options you'll have a list to select labeled "format" and ExFAT should be one of your choices.

***warning*** the format will erase everything on your external drive, so do this before you move files over, or move your files back and then format it.

I was going to say something similar.  I don't have a mac, but windows has it's own backup procedures to my external.  It creates some massive single file that it knows  how to read.  When it fills up, it doesn't backup or erases old files.

I'm not a big fan of that, especially on things important to me.  So along with the backup it automatically does, I also do a straight up drag and drop of files I want to make sure I keep.  I can physically see the copy.

I'm also considering signing up with carbonite or some other cloud/offsite storage options.  I just think if my computer should go up in flames with the house, so does my external drive.  Or they both get stolen.  Offsite lets me keep 10 years of pictures or music or documents safely somewhere else.

As a side note to the OP.  Have you uninstalled any old/unused software?  I'm surprised you didn't see a performance drop being 99% full.

I'm a huge proponent of the offsite storage services.  I've used Carbonite and Mozy and I personally like Mozy better and that's what I'm using today.  I ran carbonite for about a year and had a major hard drive failure.  When I went to restore I discovered that they automatically unselected many file types such as .pst, .avi, 3gp, .exe, .msi, etc... to save storage space.  So essentially they didn't back up any of my software installs, none of my video's, and I lost all of my outlook archives.  I was major PO'd.  Mozy doesn't deselect the larger files so I feel safer with it. 

You can go in and manually select all the file formats in carbonite to force it to back them up, but you'll spend an hour doing that and you'll still miss a bunch.