[webraider]

I'm new to Leopard and so far, I'm using Time Machine. I used to have two hard drives and I used to back up my user's folder manually. I'm wondering if Time Machine offers any real benefit over this. I don't really need a full Disk Copy (although a bootable would be ideal while we're doing it). Am I missing the point of Time Machine or is manually backing up more efficient/better? I really only need my documents and multimedia (Everything stored in my home folder). I know that Time Machine can be programmed to only back up specific Folders, however it Will eventually take up my full disk, where as a manual Back-up will not. Any thoughts?

[mduell]

Time Machine provides versioning, which your manual backup process doesn't. It also backs up hourly, which you probably don't do.

[Cadaver]

The purpose of Time Machine is to give you more than one version of a backed up file. In other words, lets say you edit and save over an old version of a text document. 3 days later, you realize you shouldn't have done that, or that you now need something that was contained in the original file that you no longer have. A manual backup would have missed this, or you would have already over-written your only copy of the old data. Time Machine, on the other hand, will give you sequential backups for several weeks of anything that changes (hourly for 24 hrs, daily for a month, weekly forever until space is full, then will drop oldest as space is needed).

Yes, it is designed to use all the available space on a particular volume. If you don't want all the space eventually occupied, you can partition the drive and give only one partition to Time Machine. You can also still use the Time Machine volume as a normal disk; the Time Machine data is simply stored in a special folder on that volume.

While I wont say that Time Machine is the perfect backup solution (especially since I'm paranoid about losing important data, so I have the most important stuff backed up in several different manners), it is a very good solution for most people.

I have about 160GB of important documents, pictures, videos, etc. My Time Machine volume, a 500GB drive, has been running since I installed Leopard the first weekend it was available. For me, Time Machine dating back to Oct 27 is only using about 270GB of space out of that 500GB.

[alex_kac]

I love it. I know its bad, but I've felt better about deleting files I *think* I don't need. I've saved quite a few important stuff that a month later I've found I needed.

[Don Pickett]

I think it's worth it. I've always known I should back up, but I was lucky (only lost one hard drive in 15 or so years) and lazy. Time machine takes a lot of the hassle out of it, so for the price of an external drive I'm covered in the case of a catastrophic failure.

[Simon]

Time Machine is free and it is very good at what it attempts to do.

It's not replacement for all other backup systems or for RAID schemes. But if you need a reliable, simple, differential backup system with simple version control that runs regularly all by itself, I see no reason not to use it.

And for special occasions you can still make full clones to other external disks or backup stuff to a remote location if that is what you require.

[OreoCookie]

One word: Yes!
It put my mind at ease, when I changed my harddrive. And on two occasions it helped me find a file that I had erroneously deleted earlier. It's Leopard's best feature.

[PaperNotes]

Time Machine wouldn't work properly on one drive that was partitioned as HFS+ and NTFS. It works fine on a purely HFS+ drive. I do TM back ups manually and it does a fine job although slow at times. I always double check files after a back up anyway.

[OreoCookie]

Why don't you do it automatically, PaperNotes?

[JKT]

As others have pointed out, there is nothing to stop you from doing manual back ups (either using TM - select the Back up now option in its dock contextual menu - or third party software). As with others, it has already saved my bacon a couple of times, on one occasion allowing me to recover Address Book which I had inadvertently deleted. Saved me from having to fire up Pacifist or re-install it from the system DVDs.

The biggest benefit as someone who previously did two different manual back ups once a week when I was running Tiger, is not having to do them so religiously anymore or spend time resolving version conflicts. This is a huge time saving for me.

Also, one other feature that others haven't yet mentioned is that, should you ever have to wipe and reinstall your system, you will be able to select your TM back up drive and recover everything on it automatically. While other back up schemes will allow you to achieve the same effect, not having to physically transfer everything yourself could be another big boon.