Incremental Backups? Time Machine?

Hi - I'm not a new mac user but I'm hoping to change my backup workflow away from Retrospect because I don't like the proprietary 'singular file' that is created for backups and would rather go to a file-copy based system.

I currently use SuperDuper! to make my backups, which is a cloning software so now my question is...

Because my laptop is getting very full, but my external drive is larger than my internal storage partitions, if I backup and delete the data from the laptop, I can't really 'clone' again to match.

I guess that drive could just be shelved.

Re: Time Machine - which I have only used, really, for a 'clean system' backup to restore to, I guess I just don't understand how Time Machine 'works' for situations where you would empty your drive/delete a bunch of data (like 150GB worth). If Time Machine saw an 'empty personal storage partition', I could still go back to whatever date I deleted and look through stuff again though......

Alternatively I guess I could partition my 2TB external drive to sizes roughly befitting my internal storage partitions and just keep them cloned.

Thanks for discussion

J-Fry said:

...
I currently use SuperDuper! to make my backups, which is a cloning software so now my question is...

Because my laptop is getting very full, but my external drive is larger than my internal storage partitions, if I backup and delete the data from the laptop, I can't really 'clone' again to match.

Click to expand...

???
Why not? SD! makes incremental backups and will make the backup match the drive being backed up, what ever has changed is changed on the backup - both additions and deletions.