Leopard HDD space. . .

The bigger the better. The more space you give time machine the longer it will keep old archived data.

Yep.

Yep - it'll catch up with synching whenever you plug it in

 

All the answers to your questions (and more) can be found in our Time Machine FAQ.

 

Time Machine will fill up your drive (eventually) regardless of its size, so it more comes down to how much of your 120GB HDD you have filled and how long you would like to keep back-ups for. Do you have a need to ever go back to documents from a year ago? Or perhaps only a few months? This will determine how big you should make your parition. Obviously it needs to initially be big enough to match your Mac's HDD, but past that, the size of the partition will simply dictate how much information TM keeps for you, as once the partition is filled, it will simply start overwriting your data starting with the oldest.

 

No problem at all - sounds like a good plan. Any other questions, just ask, that's what we're here for.

 

I have a question about Time Machine if anyone can answer please. My HDD is 120gb with an 80gb partition for mac and 40gb bootcamp partition for Windows. Will Time Machine backup all the stuff on my bootcamp partition too? If it will is there a way to stop it? I don't want all the useless windows files being backed up and eating space.

EDIT: nvm. Just looked at the TM faq thread. Ignore this please I need to learn to look before I post -_-

 

Certainly your backup disk needs to be larger than the disk it is backing up. Then how much history do you wan to keep? If you change 1GB of files per week you need 1GB more for each week yo want to store history for. I think a good rule of thumb might be that the backup drive shuold 1.5X the size of the disk you need to back up.

Yes you can keep other files on the backup drive. I don't think you need to partition the drive. The only reason to partition is if you needed a different filesystem on each partition

If the backup drive is not plugged in then all that happens is that not backup is made, it is skipped. Backups resume when you plaug the drive back in.

 

Even if TM could access the Windows files, there is a feature in TM where you tell it which files not to backup.