How much HD space does Time Machine require?

[gnownayr]

if it continuously backs up my hard drive, which is using about 60gb full, how big should my external HD be?

 

[MacBoobsPro]

I have 160gb mac of which 100gb is used. I use a 250gb drive for time machine and since the day Leopard came out (a month ago?) my Time Machine drive still has 57gb left. So a months worth of backing up has taken up about 177gb. 100gb of which is the intial backup and the other 77gb is what it has backed up since the initial backup (i think thats how it works anyway).

 

[dlmart2]

My system drive is about 70 GB of data, and my external drive is about 385 GB of data (mostly music and images). My Time Machine drive is 750GB capacity, and I only have 15 GB free.

My oldest backup is Nov 6th, but I add a couple of gigs of music a week and I'm constantly updating my audio tags on existing files, which causes Time Machine to look at the MP3 file as "modified", so it backs it up again...

 

[apfhex]

Time Machine uses as much space as it can until it runs out. You want a drive at least as big as the one you're using. I have 201GB total space on my main partition of which I'm using 105GB, and the TM backup of that is currently 143GB (started October 31st). My TM drive is 465GB.

 

[desenso]

I'm using a TM drive that has twice the capacity of my laptop's drive. I figure this is a decent enough standard. It depends on the extent to which you think you'll need to use the ability to go back in time. For me, personally, I think I'll rarely need to do this so it's not much of a concern to me.

 

[smartalic34]

I have an 80GB internal drive, and an 80GB partition on my external for Time Machine (the other 240GB is movie storage). I still have 38GB out of 80 left. My oldest backup is Oct. 29... so I would say at least have a TM partition as big as your internal, and if your internal is almost full, then at least double your internal.