External disk for Mac Leopard Time Machine?

[johnastovall]

I've got my MacBook Pro running Leopard and want to start using Time Machine. It's a 250GB disk. I've been thinking about either a 1TB Western Digital My-Book or the LeCie Neil Poulton 1TB drive.

Suggestions?

Also any issues with not using Time Machine all the time? I don't want to carry it with me on trips.

[PeteQ]

I have a 500GB usb powered drive that I have partitioned off. One area for Time Machine on the MacBook and the other for my on location backups. It is always with me, always backing up my primaries (laptop and cf cards) so it works well. I suppose it could fail and I would lose my old Time Machine data but that's ok, I would hook up another drive and move forward.

But more to your question. No, there is no problem only backing up when you are hooked up at home. My friend does this for her business as she deals in documents and an 8GB flash drive is more than enough for travel storage...

[Daniel W.]

I leave the time machine at home, and sync up with the school's servers from afar if the backup is critical (and school related). 500GB WD + on-sale-bargain-basement enclosure. Back it up every week.

Funny Stovall, thought your "time machine" was a binder full of neg sleeve pages.

[S-Man]

I have a 1 TB MyBook hooked up as Time Machine. I don't leave TM on all the time, just when I want to do a backup. I'll backup like, once a month or every other month. If you let it backup as much as it wants, it will eat up the HDD like pac man at a blue ghost convention...*Hammit! Hammit! Hammit!*

[PeteQ]

Originally Posted by S-Man

I have a 1 TB MyBook hooked up as Time Machine. I don't leave TM on all the time, just when I want to do a backup. I'll backup like, once a month or every other month. If you let it backup as much as it wants, it will eat up the HDD like pac man at a blue ghost convention...*Hammit! Hammit! Hammit!*

If you partition your drive TM can only eat up what you tell it to and then it throws out older versions. Backing up once a month or every other month, while certainly better than nothing at all, doesn't seem like a real good strategy. For the price of a 1TB hard drive it's not worth my time to worry about a month of last data. YMMV

[S-Man]

^ yeah, I probably should back up more often, but truth be told, I wouldn't really miss all that much from a month of 'work', unfortunately. Besides that, all my photos are stored and backed up on my external HDD's, so that's all I really worry about.
I'm sure other people may have the need to backup every day, especially if you're storing alot of work on your internal HDD.

[PeteQ]

For me it's not the ongoing data so much, raws go to dvd upon ingestion and my "working" drives are backed up to a Drobo, but it's about the ability to restore my machine quickly if a hardware malfunction took place.

I mean if I had to restore all my programs and stuff it would be a huge pain to feed dvd's and find all the little things, but with TM there I can just do a complete restore and I am almost home.