Okay, the play on song lyrics and titles is getting a wee bit stretched here, but bear with me… 
On my old Windows PC, I created a batch file way-back-when to copy important documents to a second hard drive I had installed in the PC. Unfortunately, the backup drive is only half the size of my main PC drive, (and smaller than the Mac’s hard drive as well) so there is no way I’m going to be able to back up both the PC files and my new Mac’s files onto that drive. I decided I would get an external backup.
After a little looking around, I decided on an external USB 2.0 drive. I ended up with the Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 500GB external USB 2.0 drive. That should be enough room to keep my files around, eh? My plan was to connect it to the PC and back up both the PC & the Mac through the PC.
So without looking too much into what I should be doing, I connected it to my PC and formatted that puppy to NTFS. So far, so good. I created a directory for the PC and backed up my files, then I created a directory for the Mac and using the backup program SuperDuper!, I started backing up my Mac. I soon discovered though, that based on the throughput, it was going to take well over 3 hours to finish the backup! (SuperDuper! was making a fully bootable backup of my hard drive…)
I decided that it might be better if I connected the My Book directly to the Mac through the USB. What I came to find out, and what a lot of you probably already know, is that the Mac cannot write to an NTFS formatted partition. I found some information on NTFS-3G and MacFuse to allow me to do that, but in the end, I just decided to create two partitions using Disk Utility on the Mac, format one for the Mac (HFS Extended), and the other for Windows (NTFS using Disk Management to format that partition). Once the drive was connected directly to the Mac, the backup took a little over two hours. Still not great, but I estimate it cut off 35% -40% of the time to backup! Now that I have a complete disk backup, I need to find a way to just backup some of my important documents on a daily basis. That will have to be the topic for another post. Anyone have any suggestions here?
Although I can’t read the Mac partition on the My Book from Windows, I really don’t care about that. I can, however, at least read the Windows partition from the Mac. I know there are numerous other ways to do what I did, but this works for me for now. Maybe later I will figure out how to get NTFS-3G working on the Mac. I’ve also read that for best performance, I should get a FireWire external hard drive instead of USB (at least for the Mac).
Ah, well. Live and learn. And have a whole heckuva lot of fun doing it!
