On of the most facinating, useful and equally powerful feature of Leopard, is Time Machine. I’ve been using Mac for over 3 months now and Time Machine for about 2 months. With this background, let me explain my usage rates.
I had a lot of data in my PC. Close to 200 GB of data, which I migrated to my mac when I bought it. Took me about 2 days (or more?), and after a month or so, I purchased a new 1TB Western Digital hard drive for 179 S$.
It was a breeze to start backing up. No questions asked. Just plug in your hard drive and start Time Machine. It’ll detect your hard drive if it’s formatted the Mac way (HFS+ Journaled, Extended) and click Yes, you are set to go.
After about 8 hours or so…, all my data (188 GB) was backed up by Time Machine. I also ripped some of my DVDs into images using the built in disk utility and stored it in that same backup drive. and the Total space remaining was around 700 GB. After 2 months of usage, I’m still left with 650GB of space. Which means two months of “heavy” usage for someone like me, it still used only 50 GB for a dataset sized 200GB. For me, any data that’s older than 2 months is obsolete. I think that’s true for any computer geek. Do a movie, photoshop image or XCode programming, you never go back upto two months and pick up the old file and start from scratch rite?
So, that’s my mileage… Yours may vary. But I think, 1.5 times your dataset size should be fine for Time Machine. That’s if your data (not the hard disk size) is, say 500GB, buy a drive that’s atleast 750GB.
Apple’s docs recommend atleast 2.5 times.. But I think that’s too much a overkill.
–Mugunth
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