Time Machine Performance Impact

[R1ch]

Does anyone know what type of performance impact having Time Machine switched on has? Does it noticeably make for a slower Mac?

I think Time Machine is brilliant and making for some very long faces at Microsoft wishing they had thought of such a great, easy to understand method for doing backups.

[/dev/toaster]

Very very little performance impact. If you have a really slow machine or you are doing something really crazy, you can always disable it during that time.

[BornAgainMac]

Very little impact for myself. Even during the initial backup. I am only dealing with 35 GB of local used storage.

One thing I have not tried is having a couple of virtualization images on my local drive. Everytime I go into Windows or Linux, it probably will try to copy that 5 GB to 15 GB image to the backup drive because it was changed. I think I would make that folder excluded from the backup and do those manually.

Side topic: I probably not the typical Apple user. Another limitation is that I have several 500 GB data drives that I have to manually backup to a spare 500 GB drive. Time Machine seems to be designed for local storage backup. I plan to use the free rsync command that ships with Leopard to handle my external drive backup needs. I wish Time Machine could handle all my backup and restore needs.