Ah Leung suggested using a Firewire HD as a backup device. I have one, and it is not without problems.
I bought mine solely for connecting to my TiBook as a scratch disk for video editing, dumping footages from my DV to the HD for non-linear editing with iMovie or Final Cut Express. Once I made a snapshot of my TiBook’s HD, before I upgraded the OS to Panther. I don’t use it for routine backup.
First none of my other computers have Firewire ports. They all have USB1, which is kind of slow, but not the show stopper. My Firewire HD is in Apple HFS+ format, which the Lady’s laptop can’t read and write. It still might have worked if I had formatted the Firewire HD as a FAT32 partition.
The biggest problem is, it’s just too much hassle plugging the external HD into the various computers in the household. This external HD also needs its own power supply. More wires to mess with.
In a heterogeneous computing environment, one needs a more advanced solution.
7 responses so far ↓
1 ah Leung // Nov 20, 2003 at 10:15 pm
I want to know what partition format should I used for the backup HD, so that it could read by Windows & Mac OSes? Is FAT32 a solution? But I know the max. size of FAT32 partition is only 2G, isn’t it?
2 tin_the_fatty // Nov 20, 2003 at 10:40 pm
No. The max size of a FAT32 partition is 2TB. See http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm.
If you want both Windows and Mac OS X to be able to read your Firewire HD, then it has got to be formatted as a FAT32 partition. Be forewarned that some mapping/translation between different filesystems (i.e. HFS+ to FAT32) will be necessary, and it might be ugly. You should however be alright if you use a backup software, or an archiver (e.g. StuffIt) to write your backup to the FAT32 partition.
3 adam // Jan 10, 2004 at 6:54 am
2TB is the maximum Volume size for fat32. you would have a hard time formating that with fat32 though.
4 gondor // Feb 6, 2004 at 9:57 pm
The theoretical max size of FAT32 is 2 TB but i tried to format a 40 GB drive in win XP and found that it will only format FAT32 partitions up to 32 GB in size, otherwise you have to use NTFS, nothing to do with this just wanted to highlight xp’s limitations, and how it annoyed me a bit.
Apparently win 98 was superior, its fdisk (which doesnt work under 2000 or xp by the way!)could format bigger FAT32 partitions. Is it any wonder people write microsoft targetted viruses.
5 jotaefe // Aug 8, 2004 at 12:32 am
To format a big HD (ex.40 Gig)using Fat32 on XP or win2k, use command prompt with:
format DriveLetter: /FS:FAT32
That will do the job!
6 ben // Aug 10, 2004 at 10:46 am
To format a big HD (ex.40 Gig)using Fat32 on XP or win2k, use command prompt with:
format DriveLetter: /FS:FAT32
That will do the job!
still fails…
7 stu // Dec 17, 2005 at 5:03 am
sorry for the anonimity but i get enough spam as it is, may I just suggest that a 2Tb fat32 partition is easily formatted by booting knoppix and doing a mkfs.vfat -cvF 32 /dev/hda1
a down side is that the fs will eat up around 1 sixth of your drive.
smile on!