TimeMachine vs. Manual External Hard Drive Backup

I think you misunderstand the way Time machine works. there is nothing at all laborious about setting it up. it backs up EVERYTHING on your hard drive by default. if you want to exclude certain things from backups you add them to the TM exclusion list. you should read [TM 101|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427]. apart from what's mentioned in this article you can also do a full system restore from any time point backed up by TM by using the TM restore utility on the leopard install DVD.

Another usefull feature is that TM backups are automatic and don't interrupt your workflow.

Time machine just does it automatically, and it knows what has changed. You can access the different versions of a specific file - the file from last week, or last month. So to duplicate that you would have to keep track of each file that changes and back them up into different places. Good luck with doing that manually 🙂

Time Machine is almost, by itself, worth the switch to a Mac. Very cool. Reliable. In the background.

To the point of your drive, you can use half the drive for TM and just keep half the drive as an external drive, if you want. The amount of space you want for TM really depends on how much your data changes.

One of the main purposes of TimeMachine is to back up your entire hard drive as well as to keep incremental backups of your files. Say for example, if something happened to your hard drive then you won't be completely in the dark because you will have a back up of your entire hard drive from which you can restore it from.
Steve

No, TM doesn't format the drive after the initial format. that would wipe out everything on the drive including all previous TM backups. Your files will be safe there. However, I recommend keeping this drive strictly for TM. you can partition it in two if you want to keep some other data there as well. keep one partition just for TM and the other for data.

BTW, TM doesn't have to format the drive even on the first run provided that drive is formatted properly. It will then give you a choice of either keeping your current data on the drive or erasing the drive and wiping the data.

Okay, so I just got an external hard drive and the only reason I got it was to transfer files from my PC to my Macbook. When I connected the external hard drive to my mac, it popped up a screen that said time machine. I thought it was just a back-up file that would be placed into my hard drive, but instead it turned the whole external drive into a time machine. Now the external hard drive won't even come up on my windows PC. Does anyone know how to change the external hard drive back to its original state? I don't want it to be a time machine.

I think that you need to reformat the drive as "FAT" so that Windows can see it.

On your Mac, run "Disk Utility", click on the external drive in the left window, and select partition. In the drop down list, select "MS DOS" as the Format.

You can also reformat the drive from Windows, using Computer Management/Storage, although the drive will be formatted as NTFS, so your Mac won't be able to write to it. Best to do it on the Mac.