Are you looking just to back up data, like I do with my music and such, or do you want full, bootable clones of your drives?

The first option doesn't require partitioning if you're willing to keep the whole drive in FAT32, and has several freeware solutions on a Mac. As I said, I use rsyncbackup, which is a command-line frontend to rsync controlled by easy-to-edit text files. Other options include PsyncX, which appears to be a GUI frontend to both psync and cron, so it can even schedule regular backups for you. Also, Lacie Silverkeeper, which is packaged with LaCie externals but is also available freely from versiontracker. With any of these three free utilities, it shouldn't be more than an hour's work to set up data backups that run regularly.

The second option requires partitioning your external drive into a Mac Portion and a Windows Portion - the Mac portion being, ideally, at least the same size as your Mac drive. Once that's done, though, PsyncX and rsyncbackup can be used to make bootable clones, or you can use the venerable $5 Carbon Copy Cloner to schedule regular clones on the Mac end.

Finally, if you want the most flexibility and power in Macland, check out SuperDuper!, a $27.95 shareware utility that appears to be able to do, well, just about anything you could want backup-wise (including both of the above things, of course), and has a perfect 5.0 rating on versiontracker, so it's probably quite nice.

I'm sure judicious research could find similar progs on Windows, but I wouldn't really know where to start - is there a website with Windows downloads that's actually as well maintained and near-universal as versiontracker? Probably not.

ETA: Looks like Ghost may be a good option in windows. A bit expensive for my tastes, but I'm a minimalist. For the best combination of ease and power, Ghost + SuperDuper would probably work quite nicely for you.

Ah, dammit. I was told that Ghost would work on Macs too. That seems to not be supported.

Thanks for the recs, D.

Pimp your Mac Mini

Worch checking out just for the silly graphic....

IOMacN, iWood 5g iPod case

Gah.

Must. Have.

Oh man -- I'm not running out and getting a Mac Mini just yet, but if I do I am so getting this firewire drive: [link]

That's the one I have. It's awesome.

Man. When I actually start making money, I'm going to go crazy with all this technology.

I'm having trouble trying to listen to streaming radio. I'd really like to listen to NHL radio or to a radio station but I can't. I'm using IE and when I click on click here to listen (it doesn't matter what radio station or website it is) the window pops up, it says Connecting to Media, then it goes to Ready and when I push the play button I get "connecting to media" again and the Ready comes up and when I push the play button it does the same thing.

I've checked out the FAQ and I've done everything it suggests and I'm still having problems.

You shouldn't have to hit the play button. I think that just resets the stream.

I clicked on the Listen Live and didn't hit any play buttons that showed up and still I don't get anything.

On NHL I can listen to the This Week in NHL thing, it's through WMP.

This is the website: [link] for Tampa bay. I go down and click the link and the player pops up but doesn't play. What's so frustrating because with my old computer I could get it to play but not well.

Hmmm. I works for me. The popup has the control panel for WMP, and it just starts up.

What version of WMP do you have installed? I know the MLB audio requires WMP 7.0 or better to work. (Although you'd probably get a message if that was it.