[I WAS the One]

Today I attached a new 500gb My Book Firewire Drive to my new iMac.
Now what?
I wanna know what to expect.
What it will do?
Can I count on it blind?
It will back up everything instantly?
it is a rip off?

[peeb]

So you want to set up Time Machine?

1. Make sure the drive is formatted for HFS+ - use disk utility for this.
2. When you plug it in for the first time, Time Machine should start up. If it doesn't, launch it.
3. It has a big ON/OFF button - move it to ON.

That's pretty much it. The first time it will take a long time to backup, after that not much at all.

[OreoCookie]

Just one more note: you can use your Time Machine drive for other things, just don't touch the backup directory directly. Don't try to fiddle with it manually (it's very well-protected, though).

E. g. if you would like to delete the backup of a file (say a large movie file you don't need to back have backed up), you can delete it in Time Machine mode of the Finder.

[I WAS the One]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie 

Just one more note: you can use your Time Machine drive for other things, just don't touch the backup directory directly. Don't try to fiddle with it manually (it's very well-protected, though).

E. g. if you would like to delete the backup of a file (say a large movie file you don't need to back have backed up), you can delete it in Time Machine mode of the Finder.

1) everything it's set up now and working.

2) WOW! I thought that the disk only worked for TM only... didn't know that it can be use for everything else! thanx for that tip.

3) If I delete a file right now. Can it be found in TM? or I will lost it completely?

[peeb]

As long as TM has copied you drive the first time, you will be able to recover it. Test it with a file you have another copy of! You might also want to check out Apple's extensive documentation on time machine...

[OreoCookie]

It's important to have a look at the way Time Machine schedules backups: it will make hourly backups for the last 24 hours, daily backups for the last month and weekly backups until your disk is full.

This means, the file you would like to recover has to be on your disk long enough. (If you create a file and delete it two hours later, the backup containing a copy may be deleted after 24 hours.)

But in general, you can recover files and even go back to different versions at your leisure.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by I WAS the One 

2) WOW! I thought that the disk only worked for TM only... didn't know that it can be use for everything else! thanx for that tip.

While this is possible, it certainly is not a good idea.
Any data on the Time Machine volume will NOT be backed by Time Machine.

I would set up a separate partition on that drive. You can use the new Disk Utility, which allows live resizing of the partitions. Set up two partitions, one for TM, and one for extra data,

-t

[OreoCookie]

There are situations where this is actually useful without using partitions: e. g. I do that to use the same harddrive for my Time Machine backups and one of my Aperture vaults. Works great so far.

But I agree, the whole idea of Time Machine is `fire it up and forget', so using the Time Machine harddrive for other things counteracts this a bit.