Shoudl Time Machine drive be bigger than source drives?

[speekez]

Should a Time Machine drive ideally be bigger than the sum of the drive(s) it is backing up? If your Time Machine drive is 500GB, and you are backing up a 500GB -- the more you fill up your 500GB source drive, the fewer steps back in time that Time Machine will be able to store.

True?

 

[CalMin]

Exactly.

 

[trainguy77]

Yes its ideal to have a larger time machine drive then that its backing up...unless you aren't backing up everything on the one drive.

 

[0098386]

There are lots of things I don't want backing up, that I keep backed up myself. TV show torrents and things like that. I only backup my account. It took from Leopards launch to now for me to fill up my mini 60gb external drive just backing up my account.

Plus my 140gb iTunes library is already on an external drive.

 

[volvoben]

Indeed, depends on use; for instance i don't bother backing up my applications on my macbook because i have all the install files on another machine and on optical. For people without much computer administration skill I try to give them a bit more than their HDD capacity just so they could 'get their computer back' in the event of failure, or have a few older versions of the work or paper or whatever they've been working on. For instance I gave my girlfriend an external drive for her 250gb iMac, and gave her a 300gb partition for TM (rest for her dvd video files that could easily be replaced if lost).