Quick HDD and TM/TC question

[shneady]

Do duplicate files on my iMac hdd take up additional storage space? For example, my girl and I share the iMac and we both have music, video's and pic's under our own login's in their respective music, video and picture folders. We've also set up our own folders in the Shared Folder with a lot of these music, video and picture files in there that way there we can share between them on our own desktop login. Is this taking up additional hdd space?

Also, how does time machine go about backing these up? If they are duplicates does TM recognize this and only send over one file, or both and will this take up additional storage on my Time Capsule as well?

I just want to make sure I get all this straight before I start my TM backup (finally), that way there I don't have to do all this clean up initially before tm continuously backs to my tc... Thanks for all your help, and I guess this was a long question. Sorry

 

[Makosuke]

Barring special circumstances, the duplicate files under different accounts you describe DO take up twice the space. And when you back them up, they WILL need to be transferred twice and WILL take up twice the space on your Time Machine drive.

A very common solution is to have the shared media files in a mutually accessible location (in /Users/Shared if you only have the one drive, or on an external secondary drive if you have one) and then have each user just access them there. There are tutorials all over the web on how this is set up and what the limitations are, if you do some searches.

To me, at least, it's worth the time to get everything consolidated, both for storage and so you don't have two out-of-synch media libraries on the same machine.