Time Machine Hard Drive Guidelines?

[neoelectronaut]

I'm looking for an external hard drive to use with my iMac to back it up via Time Machine.

The computer has a Firewire 800 port so I'd like to go with that.

If my computer has a 1Tb internal HDD should I start with a minimum 1Tb drive or should I start at 1.5Tb or 2?

 

[Semiopaque]

Are you really using or have near term plans to use up all 1 TB in your iMac? No reason to plan on backing up more than you're going to need.

If you only have say 500 GB used and aren't going to add a lot to it soon, a 1 TB Time Machine drive would be more than sufficient. Decent 1 TBs are pretty cheap now a days even compared to other drive sizes so I don't think I'd bother with anything less than that regardless.

 

[neoelectronaut]

Well, just checked the stats and I've got 448.02 of the 1TB drive available, and that's including a 100GB partition for Windows 7/Boot Camp

 

[DoFoT9]

1TB will be plenty