Time Machine Help

TimeMachine Answers

Answers:

1. You can back up to any locally mounted removable disk volume. When you plug it in, TimeMachine will throw a dialog up and ask if you want to use the new disk for time machine. So the short answer is any drive that can be plugged into a USB, firewire or esata port that exists on your mac.

2. I have read where you can use time machine to back up to network mounted volumes such as another computer or a NAS device on your network. (Network Attached Storage)

3. HFS+ is the volume format used by Apple. It stands for Hierarchical File System. When you plug in a drive for the first time, if it does not already have HFS+ formatting, you can format the drive with diskutil. If the device already has file systems (NTFS) then the Mac may create an HFS image on the disk and use that for time machine. You may want to partition the drive with an independent HFS+ partition. Be careful not to erase files that are already on the drive if you have been using it already.

4. The size of the drive must be at least as large as the used space on your existing drive. The size of your TM drive will define how far back your back-ups will exist. I never put less than 1 TB on my time machine drives. The Time capsule comes in 500 GB and 1 TB sizes. Many of my drives are 2 TB raids with raid1 (mirrored).

 

2. Yes, it is. Although it is not supported officially and requires a couple tricks. You can find many informations through a google search.

4. As the previous pster said a 1TB drive should be a good choice. In fact I think a good rule of thumb is to use a drive with double the size of the disk you are backing up. Of course it all depends on how much files are changed between backups and how big those files are.
Another factor is how much of the 500GB drive you are going to use: if you only use for example 100GB a smaller backup drive will be enough.
I would take the 1TB drive, which is a good investment in my opinion.

It only backaps the whole files that changed since the last backup. That means that if you just change a MB of a 20GB file, the whole file will be copied again.