Preparing for External HD

[cz9h3d]

My first mac will be here in a couple weeks (iMac i7 w1TB), so I'm currently looking for a Firewire800 external drive for backup. I've read a lot of comments, and continue to waver between a WD or Seagate, or maybe an OWC or G-drive or LaCie, or maybe build my own!

Anyways, I've zero experience with Time Machine - is this what I'll want to use for my backup? Will a 1TB external be sufficient? Note that I only have maybe 200GB in photos/music/video (maybe not even that much - yet!).

I guess my real questions are:
(1) should I partition my iMac hard drive?
(2) will a 1TB external be fine (for quite some time)?
(3) Is Time Machine worthwile, or should I look into SuperDuper, etc?

And I guess HD suggestions are what's relevant for this forum, but I hate to ask an often-asked question.

thanks..

 

[rowsdower]

(1) should I partition my iMac hard drive?

I'm not sure what this would accomplish, unless you want to install Windows. If you want to exclude certain folders from the backup, you can do that in Time Machine preferences without partitioning.

(2) will a 1TB external be fine (for quite some time)?

Time Machine will create a copy of everything on your drive. It will then create new copies of files as they change, and keep the old ones as long as there is space. Since the iMac has a 1TB drive as well, you will always have a full backup. If you want to be able to get old copies of files that have changed or deleted, you need extra space on the drive. If you only have 200GB of stuff now, I think you should be fine for a while.

(3) Is Time Machine worthwile, or should I look into SuperDuper, etc?

They have slightly different purposes. With SuperDuper you could (in theory) boot directly from the backup drive if your main drive fails. With Time Machine you would have to get a new drive, reinstall the operating system, and restore the data to it. However, Time Machine keeps historical files as long as it can, whereas SuperDuper will always have just what was there at the last backup.