I finally made some time to get a backup system in place for my work and home machine. I had purchased an acomdata 250GB external drive some time ago and had cloned my mac drive to it when upgrading to Tiger but had never since decided quite how to accommodate both machines.

Initially I was backing up my mac laptop to my iPod - which works great by the way (and saved my ass not too long ago when my drive died) - but I still felt uncomfortable having my work machine only backed up there and felt really uncomfortable not backing up my home system at all.

Ok, back to setting up the external drive, I decided to go with 2 partitions: one HFS+ for the mac and the other an NTFS for the PC. Partitioning it was easy using the mac's Disc Utility. I simply split the drive into one HFS+ volume and one FAT32 (the only windows compatible format available via Disc Tools) volume. I figured I'd just reformat the FAT32 volume to NTFS using XP - but of course, the PC balked at recognizing the drive. sigh

So a little research on the web led me to an application by Mediafour called MacDrive (very highly recommend this by the way) which allows PCs to recognize and read mac discs and drives. Very nice. They have a free 5-day demo which I downloaded and installed and it worked like a dream. Voila, there was the Work Backup volume indicated as a mac drive and the Home Backup volume - which I was then able to reformat as NTFS. Incidentally, why reformat to NTFS? Well, FAT32 has a filesize limitation - it won't read/write files over 4GB in size, and backups will be considerably larger than that.

So once the drive was set up, I used Retrospect to backup my mac and XPs backup utility to back up the PC. By the way, the backup utility on XP home is not installed by default. You either have to install it from your XP Home CD-Rom or if your vendor did not include the software you can download the utility here.

Ahh, a bit of effort but well worth it for the peace of mind.