Which hard drive for Time Machine?

[piccolo1990]

Hi Ive just bought a macbok pro, it has an internal hard drive of 160Gb so I was thinking for time machine i should get an external hard drive of 160Gb also? Which hard drive is best for this, I dont really want to pay over £70?

Any help advice will be apprecated

 

[rgarjr]

U can get a larger sized drive. There's just tons of external drives out there nowadays.

 

[mrbrightside623]

There are a lot of hard drives out there that are fairly cheap now. www.frys.com has deals here and there where a 500gb hard drive will be like $50, say microcenter and so forth. I think I've even seen a 1TB hard drive for like $79 once from frys. You can try newegg and amazon.com as well.
But I'd say go for the bigger drive if the price fits. Can't be too safe about more space
-Tony

 

[Hellhammer]

As said above, get 1TB. It has the best price per GB ratio and can easily be found for less than 70£

 

[alphaod]

For Time Machine you want a drive bigger than your internal disk, so when you make backups, multiple versions can be stored (hence "Time Machine")

 

[fernande-mac]

For Time Machine, you need at least 1.5 times the size of the data you want to back up.

However, you won't be able to find any hard disk smaller than 500GB.

So, just buy a 500GB hard disk.

 

[dacreativeguy]

For Time Machine you want a drive bigger than your internal disk, so when you make backups, multiple versions can be stored (hence "Time Machine")

A bigger drive will give you lots of backup history, but you really don't need such a large drive to keep several months of backups. TM doesn't backup the OS files, so that saves about 10GB. And then after the initial backup, TM only updates the new/deleted/changed files. So unless you are processing GBs of movies every day, it will take a long time to fill up a drive that is equal to or a bit less than the size of your system drive.