Best External HD for Time Machine

Hi Tim,
Time Machine should work with both persons. It creates it's own folder named as backup and will be different for each user. I would suggest for added safety and peace of mind to partition the drive and each direct your time machine backup onto a separate partition. I allocated 100GB to back up of my 250GB HD. As time Machine erases over older files, this seems plenty of storage for many days worth of redundancy. As far as mfg choice, I had no experience with either. Most HD are very similar. Apple has a compatibility list. Main difference to look for is connections such as USB and Firewire. PowerPC Macs can only boot from Firewire. Intel can do either. - Hope that Helps. Let me know if you need additional clarifications.

I would also consider external drives (FireWire, 800 if possible) from Other World Computing, www.macsales.com.

I have found their products to be a good value, and they have excellent customer service.

That's funny, cause I was not going to indicate I have an OWC Mercury Elite Pro and found Tech supporting lagging for me.

tim healey wrote:
2. Is this possible via the AirPort Extreme Base Station with Gigabit Ethernet?

No, at the present time TM does not back up to a drive attached to an Airport Extreme. You can either attach the drive directly to the mac you want to back up, or attach it to another Leopard Mac and back up remotely.

Hi Tim,

From what i've heard you cant back up over airport at the moment, before leopard was released apple said it would be possible but once it was released that function has been dropped.

See the link:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/26/appleyanks_wireless_backup_from_leopard_lastminute.html

Also Leopard 10.5.2 is rumored to be coming soon so i suppose that feature could possible come along with that update. but that is just a rumor!

Finally i have just received my iomega 500 GB, FW400 for £99.99 from the apple store.

for £40 more you could get the FW800 version which apparently doubles the speed, i decided it wasn't worth £40 extra.

I read a lot of good reviews on the US apple store about it so decided to buy. So far it seems like a good piece of kit, it is fairly loud compared to imac, but imac runs almost completely silently. the firewire cable that comes in the box isn't very long, i intend to buy a longer cable and move the drive away from my desktop.

One more thing if your thinking of getting a macbook i would wait until the end of january, I'm pretty sure apple is releasing something and it's been a long time since a proper macbook update.

Hope this helps, if you like i can let you know how the drive is after i've had it a bit longer.

I would NOT get a Western Digital MyBook. I have had nothing but problems with two of them now.