[raf66]

Good morning. I'm a relatively new Mac user (10 months or so) and before yesterday had no external hard drive connected to my iMac (upgraded to Snow Leopard). The fear of losing family photos, music collection, important docs, etc. in a computer crash finally prompted me to purchase a 320 GB firewire hard drive from Verbatim.

My question will probably illustrate my newbness but I'm wondering if there's anything more I need to do besides just plugging it in. After doing so last night I was happy to see that everything appeared to backup to the new hard drive via Time Machine and it did so pretty quickly (thanks firewire). Will Time Machine take care of everything for me from here on out? Do I need to schedule it to do backups? Does Time Machine backup both the every day files on my computer (docs, photos, music) and the system files?

Thanks for your assistance.

[ibook_steve]

There is nothing else you have to do. Time Machine backs up everything, by default, so you can quickly rebuild your system on a new drive.

Steve

[angelmb]

Time Machine backs up everything, by default,

If you have a look at /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist it seems some folders are not included, like Caches. Besides those there listed, what would you exclude from Time Machine hourly backups?.