Should I use Time Machine?

Its always a good idea to backup your data and Time Machine is not a bad way to do it especially if you are looking for an easy way of backing up.

One thing to keep in mind is that time machine will continue to back up onto you drive until it is full so if you plan to use the drive for anything else this could be a problem. To avoid this issue I recommend partitioning your drive and making the one partition just for Time Machine, once the partition is full it will start overwriting older backups automatically. You should allow your Backup partition to be at least the size of the drive you are backing up - The more space you allow the more backup history Time Machine will be able to retain.

 

Not to really hijack- but does Time Machine back up iTunes library too?

To OP- I am going to do the same thing connecting once a week- I believe you can tell it to backup once a week. EIther way- It will continue noting the changes to your files and when the HDD is connected it will perform the backup (I think)

 

I've had Time Machine running since June 21 on a 498 GB partition of a 750 GB hard disk. My Intel Mac mini has a 55 GB hard disk. Currently, TM has used 420 GB of the partition. Runs every 15 minutes. Aside from the purring of the external drive (Maxtor), it's undetectable. I've yet to need anything restored, but it has the coolest interface of any piece of software ever made, so it's slick just to look for stuff.

It doesn't appear that there's an option for only weekly backups, at least from within the application itself. There could be some Terminal voodoo that does the trick, however.

My iTunes library is on a separate partition and not backed up. My iPhoto library is also on a separate partition that IS backed up.

Only issue was a power outage during a late-night backup. Had to delete an intermediary file then everything was hunky dory. Well worth the price of the Leopard upgrade alone.

mt

 

Use TM. It is seamless and doesn't get in the way.

TM backs up everything from every internal disk, unless you tell it otherwise.

 

Is there a reason not to use it?

 

Not really. Backup is a (nearly) universally good thing.
Oh, wait, was that a rhetorical question?

In any case, there are reasons that you may want to exclude certain partitions or drives from the backup process, though. A good example of this is a secondary internal drive (on a Mac Pro) that holds audio/scratch data for multitrack music production. You don't want Time Machine to start backing up your audio drive in the middle of a recording session, causing a dropout right in the middle of an otherwise excellent vocal track or guitar riff. Setting up a Super Duper backup solution for that is probably better than Time Machine.

If the drive or folder that houses your iTunes library hasn't been excluded, yes, it will. My library is backed up this way. The Time Machine Preferences panel has a user-editable list of excluded drives/folders.