Time Machine choices

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My iMac 21.5 is 4 months old and I'm trying to choose a backup system. Time Capsule seems pretty expensive for me. External hd's get me a little confused.
Looking for a 2T drive in the $100 range.
Noticed some advertise Mac version. Is this a must?
What are your thoughts?
Bill
 
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You can take any portable hard drive and turn it into a Time Machine. It's as simple as choosing your price range, finding one that suits you, and buying it.


I would suggest Iomega, personally, because they are highly reliable. Just do some searching and look for reviews on portable hard drives and choose what you find to be best.
 
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chas_m

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Time Machine = software that backs up your boot drive.

Time Capsule = a combination hard drive and router sold by Apple to facilitate Time Machine backups. Not mandatory, but nifty if you need it.
 
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Time Capsule just has the advantage of being over the network so you never have to "attatch" your Macbook to the backup device, it can simply do it over the network.
 
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Noticed some advertise Mac version. Is this a must?
This usually means that it's been pre-formatted to work with Macs so you don't have to do it yourself. You can easily format the drive if needed so don't pay extra for a "Mac version". The only other possible option that a Mac version might have is Firewire. Windows can use Firewire but it's not as common as on Mac so some people think of Firewire as a Mac feature. Any hard drive can be used on either Windows or Macs.
 
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Haven't set up my Time Machine yet but want too. I have a Seagate external drive I used on my PC to back up and export to my Mac. I want to keep all my old PC files and back up my Mac.

How much space do I need on this external HD for Time Machine back ups?

Thanks

Tom
 

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Haven't set up my Time Machine yet but want too. I have a Seagate external drive I used on my PC to back up and export to my Mac. I want to keep all my old PC files and back up my Mac.

How much space do I need on this external HD for Time Machine back ups?

Thanks

Tom
I started out with a 500GB Timecapsule and tried to use it to back up my MBP and my wife's MacBook, but had to give up on the idea because of lack of capacity, and frankly speed of wifi backup was too slow.
I have since switched to using individual USB and FireWire Seagate drives with Timemachine and that works pretty well. Both drives are small (a little bigger than an iPhone) and powered by their respective ports so no adaptor required.

As far as size goes, depends on how much of your current drive space you are using, but I wouldn't go smaller than the drive you are trying to back up.
 
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Thanks, I just looked and I have about 170GB left on it. I've also read that I don't need to back up the System files off the Mac which reduces the volume backed up considerably - is that true?

Tom
 

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I would backup everything - system files, documents, applications, etc. You never know when you may need to recover a file from the Time Machine backup to replace a corrupted or missing one on your Mac. And that applies to system files as well.
 

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