What is the best way to use Time Machine?

Buy the biggest external hard drive you can afford. Plug it in. Format it as HFS+. Tell Time Machine you want to use that drive as your backup volume.

If your Mac is a portable, make sure you have that drive connected and mounted whenever it's convenient to do so.

 

so there is absolutely no way to use tm with a any kind of network share except for another leopard machine?

 

Correct. It's likely (but not guaranteed) that in the future Apple will also support storage connected to an Apple Airport wireless base station.

 

get a %150 bigger than internal external hard drive.

 

too bad. who wants an external drive on their desk all the time? for incremental backup 100mbit should be way enough and much more stable than a wireless connection such as airport. maybe and hopefully they will (re)add that feature in the future. i would put another 500gb hdd into my htpc so time machine would backup my mac while i'm watching tv.

 

Would something like this work? Apparently it shows up as a local disk and not a network share. Do any other NAS drives/enclosures work?

 

Yes, I use a Ximeta enclosure, now $40 at Frys. Got mine I think for about $15 after rebate. Use a Maxtor 500 GB drive ($90 at Frys). Downloaded the Leopard driver from their website. Seems to work fine. I have it connected to one of the switch ports on my wifi router (dlink dir655) My daughter also has one at college in her dorm room.

 

So you can use this enclosure, hook it up to your wifi router and it will show up on your Mac as a drive? Even if you connect your computer to the router wirelessly? If so, we can basically do wireless backups with Time Machine then?