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Focusing on Time Machine for a second. Does anybody have any idea how much hard drive space it takes up to store all that space to go way back in time like that? Lets say I have 1000gb, Do you think i need something like 3 terrabytes to hold all the data for time machine to work correctly. I am just slightly confused how time machine actually works, because it seams to hold alot of data.

I think Time Machine was made more for an external HDD user than for someone with just one, normal sized HDD. There's an option to turn it off, so I think they understand that if you don't have the space for it, then there's no use for it.

Yes you would need an external drive.. since that's how you should backup anyways. It defeats one purpose of doing backups if you backup to the internal drive and then you have a hard drive failure Whenever you do backups you should always backup to an external drive.

I was just saying that if I had 4 internal hard drives... and 2 are dedicated to time machine and 2 are my regular drives.. I know it has to be a seperate drive, but I didn't want to waste desktop space with external.

PowerBookG4 said:

Focusing on Time Machine for a second. Does anybody have any idea how much hard drive space it takes up to store all that space to go way back in time like that? Lets say I have 1000gb, Do you think i need something like 3 terrabytes to hold all the data for time machine to work correctly. I am just slightly confused how time machine actually works, because it seams to hold alot of data.

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It needs as much space as you have files totalled over time. So if you have 1TB of storage and you have filled 486gb it will need that 486gb. Then you go and erase 10gb, it will still need to use the full 486 and whatever files you continue to add. It doesn't create a full backup every single day, it looks at the files that are there and uses some sort of log to keep track of all of the days that the file is there unchanged. If you are constantly adding tons of things to your storage and removing them afterwards, then you will need a whole lotta space

Im wondering if you have the option of choosing say 1 folder on your desktop that you do not want backed up (say because its where I want to download unimportant stuff before I delete them).

Or maybe you could prune it so it can delete some files which you deleted and have not recovered in say 6 months..

Its just otherwise I can see the need for massive and mutiple externel drives..