Using Disk Utility to Backup Your Mac While Time Machine is a great way to backup your Mac, sometimes it can be very useful to create a disk image of your Mac OS X hard drive to store on an external drive. That said, if you have an external drive that you use for data storage or backup, and one that is far more likely to still be a mechanical hard disk drive, you can and should securely erase it.
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You may wish to use an external FireWire or USB hard drive to store your Aperture Library, referenced images, or Vaults. Here are some suggestions on preparing the external hard drive for best performance with Aperture. Many external hard drives come pre-formatted as FAT 32. This is a native Windows file format that can be read by Mac OS X, but is not ideal for use with Aperture.
Before you begin to use your new external hard drive with Aperture, reformat it to the Mac OS Extended file system: • Be sure your drive is attached and mounted. • If you have already written any data to the drive, back it up before proceeding to the next step. • In the Finder, choose Go > Utilities.
The /Applications/Utilities folder will open. • Launch Disk Utility. • Click the icon for your external hard drive in the sidebar on the left. • Click the Erase tab along the top of the window.
• From the Volume Format menu, choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled). • Enter a name for the external hard drive in the Name field. • Click the Erase button. Information about products not manufactured by Apple, or independent websites not controlled or tested by Apple, is provided without recommendation or endorsement. Apple assumes no responsibility with regard to the selection, performance, or use of third-party websites or products. Apple makes no representations regarding third-party website accuracy or reliability.
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When you buy a new hard drive, your first impulse may be to connect it to your Mac and start copying files to the new drive. But with all that new storage space it might make sense to partition the hard drive. When you partition, you are dividing the hard drive’s storage space into sections. For example, you can partition a 1TB hard drive into two 500GB sections. Each section would appear on your Mac’s desktop like a single hard drive would.
Partitioning can help organize your data. You can create a partition that stores just the documents you create, or dedicate a partition to storing your iTunes media. This tutorial goes through the steps of partitioning an empty external hard drive using Disk Utility, which comes with every Mac. The steps here are using Mac OS X 10.6.7 and should be similar for older OS versions.
We have a separate tutorial on while it's being used to boot your Mac. That tutorial can also be used to partition an external hard drive that has data on it. In a previous tutorial, we covered using Disk Utility. We will use the same software to partition the formatted capacity. As long as you don't want to create partitions with less capacity than the data already on the drive, partitioning shouldn't have to require erasing any existing data. Before you partition a drive, you need to protect your data by copying that drive’s data to another storage device.
If you are using Time Machine, you can restore your data from a Time Machine backup after you partition the drive. Be sure to run Time Machine before you decide to partition, so your backup is recent. Once Disk Utility is done partitioning your drive, the partitions will appear on your desktop as individual hard drive icons. For example, if you partition a 2TB hard drive into three partitions, three hard drive icons will appear. In this example, we will partition an external hard drive (the 1 TB CalDigit drive in the screenshot) into two partitions. Here is the tutorial on while it's being used to boot your Mac.