I must admit I’m just a bit giddy about this new cat. It is a new experience for me to be excited about an operating system upgrade. It is surreal for me as a former PC guy to contemplate a new operating system without a hardware upgrade of any sort. Nevertheless, here I am watching the Apple propaganda videos and reading anything I can get my hands on. As part of this upgrade I plan on embracing Time Machine so I had to get serious about external storage.

I have a 1TB Firewire drive and a collection of USB external drives I’ve collected over the years. I spent the evening configuring the Terabyte drive for Leopard and thought I’d share my strategy with everyone.

I’ve partitioned the drive into four drives as follows:

1. MacBook Pro SD

This is a 130GB partition for my SuperDuper image. My 160GB drive actually has a capacity of about 148 GB but I can’t imagine ever running the drive up to 130GB. (Famous last words)

2. Final Cut Media Drive

This 120GB partition holds all my external media for Final Cut Studio, Logic and various Jam Packs. Interestingly, I have this data also duplicated on a portable Western Digital portable Passport drive. They both have the same name and Final Cut, Logic, and Garage Band all see the data regardless of whether I’m plugged into the Firewire or USB Passport. Excellent.

3. Time Machine 350GB

There are lots of opinions about how big a Time Machine Drive should be. I’m going with just a tad over double the drive capacity. I guess we’ll find out together.

4. Data ~316GB

This is where I keep the rest of my data. It includes the Aperture masters, Videos, a 40GB iTunes library, Encrypted legal files and a host of other data I can’t bring myself to dump.

So there you have it. I’m good to go with Leopard this weekend. One other precaution I’m taking is keeping a SuperDuper copy of my Tiger rig on a USB drive for a few weeks after I upgrade to Leopard just in case.

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