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I have found out the hard way too, if you're doing a lot of video work and have a drive the same size as the one in your Mac, using Time Machine will eat up that space quick, unless you choose NOT to also keep the folder of videos. Each time you add/remove one it will also add it to the backup and not remove it. Since I do a lot of work converting videos as well as recording of them from my TV tuner, I found that after only a week, I filled up my backup drive with only 40% of it being the "everything else" and 60% of it being the "videos" that I either removed or deleted, even when I used the "Securely Empty Trash" option to delete those files. Once I removed the folders where it saves the data for the movie files, it rarely added to the backup drive. Same can be said for any other large files your working with on your system. So even if your a programmer that works on large program files, you're going to want to either exempt the folders which you're working in, or you're going to want/need a hefty drive for those backups, especially if you change them a lot, for Time Machine. Other backup choices may not be as bad as Time Machine at backing up your data but, cannot be as convenient.

DisabledTrucker said:

After reading this article, and your post I looked at my Time Machine hard drive. Wow! What happened? Talk about the incredible shrinking hard drive.
I have a Elgato EyeTV 200. It never occurred to me that Time Machine was not only backing up my eMail, Documents, System Files, but everything else... including Videos. Episodes of Storm Hawks I recorded a week ago. An Episode of House recored a month ago. All still there; just waiting to be clicked on and brought to todays desktop to be re-viewed.
Until now I did not know you could pick and choose which folders you could back up. Now the Movies folder has been taken off that list.
No more episodes of Sesame Street just sitting there taking up valuable hard drive real estate.

I noted two things: the article is out of date (no mention of wireless connections), and there is a lot of information on how to back-up and no mention of how to restore. This is a pet peeve of mine concerning back-up documentation. Most gives the impression that you will never need to restore data. Interesting, since that is the whole point of backing up your data in the first place. Seriously, I would find it reassuring to see a walkthrough showing what it will look like if your hard disk crashes and you are restoring data to a new drive.

Time Machine is crap. This article is hilarious because it's titled "Take Control of Easy Backups in Leopard" and then proceeds to give you instructions that sound like how to launch the Space Shuttle.
Here's an easy question -- how do I restore my entire hard drive with Time Machine if my working drive fails? Oops. It's not easy.
An easy backup solution was Backup 1.0. It allowed me to select email, Documents, Preferences, Bookmarks, etc., and all it did was mirrored my drive every time it backed up. The size of the backup was always the size of my main drive.

tallscot said:

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Actually, it is an easy two-step process. 1) install a fresh copy of 10.5 2) Migrate all your data and settings, telling it to use the time machine backup as the source. About the only way you could get any easier than that is by skipping step one (such as you can with a SuperDuper backup), but even so it's not like step one is at all difficult.

That said, time machine is definitely not for everyone. If you don't care about being able to recover that e-mail you deleted two days ago when you realize that you forgot to copy down the phone number from it, or being able to restore your term paper that Word just mangled, and all you really need a backup for is disaster recovery, then you probably would be more interested in something like SuperDuper (recently updated for 10.5) which just keeps a snapshot of your drive at the last point you backed up. With such a program, you can skip step one and just go to step two, at the expense of the hourly, "versioned" backup time machine provides. If you run SuperDuper fairly often, you might not even loose more than half a day or so of work, as opposed to Time machine, where you will never lose more than an hours work (assuming you save frequently), and probably not even that much. Personally, I think having to install a fresh copy of the OS before restoring my backup and needing a larger drive to store it is a VERY small price to pay for the ease of use, convenience, and muti-version security that Time Machine provides. But that's just me.

Migration Assistant for restoring a backup? Hmm. Never thought of doing that. Maybe it would be easier if they just had something in Time Machine to do that? Have you ever done this? I'd be interested in seeing how it works. I'll have to create a Time Machine backup and then test it. Of course, having Time Machine create a backup of just a single folder requires I go in and tell it not to backup hundreds of other folders...

No, I never accidentally delete an email and then go to the trash and empty it and then think, "Oh no, I deleted my email!" Having to delete it twice pretty much makes it something I've never ever done in 25 years of computing. ;)

It's my opinion that Time Machine isn't convenient. For one thing, it's a lot easier for me to tell you what I want backed up versus having to tell Time Machine what I don't want to have backed up. Backup 1.0 was easy in this regard. Time Machine is not.

I don't need 23 versions of my 1 gig ClientMovie.MOV file being created. I just want the latest one. And if you are going to tell me that I can tell Time Machine to not backup Folder X, that's great, until I create a new folder. Then I need to go back in and tell it not to back up that one too. But I do want one backup, just not multiple copies of the same file.

Having Time Machine running backups in the background while I'm working, and backing up everything I open and edit since the last time it performed a backup, is damn annoying and unnecessary for me and a waste of CPU cycles and hard drive space.

There are many backup applications out for OS X that make it easy, and mirror your drive every night automatically. I just tell it once, "Back up my User folder and this folder over on this other drive every night at 10 PM to this hard drive." That's it. If my main drive crashes, I can boot from my second drive because it already has OS X on it and access the files right then.

I think it bears repeating that the advantage of a bootable clone is availability. When my iMac crashed, it automatically booted from the SuperDuper clone. It took about a week to get a replacement, and it took the technician about half an hour to install. When he was done, I cloned in reverse, and I was back to normal.

Let's look at that situation with Time Machine. If I had wanted to use the computer that week, I would have had to buy another external drive, install OS X, and restore. When the drive was replaced, I would have had to install OS X and restore again.

True, but how often does your hard drive die? For most people it will probably never happen. Knock on wood. And you don't have to install OS/X and restore twice afaik if you play your cards right. If my hd in my iMac broke down I would get a SATA hd and an external case and restore to that hd. The tech could take that hd and throw it back in the iMac afaik.
To the other guy it's better for most people to tell Time Machine what not to backup because it's better to be safe than sorry by default.
Also I'm sure Time Machine will eventually get extra options to better accommodate different users.

As for restoring from a crash with Time Machine, when you boot from the Leopard Install CD (or recovery CDs for a recent Mac) you can select from the menu "Restore from Time Machine Backup..." This recovers the full machine, and I used it to migrate from one machine to another, much faster than a file-by-file copy of migration.
That being said, while Time Machine isn't the end-all be-all of backups, as a small business IT consultant, I can tell you that I have an office of 5 people that is now backing up because of Time Machine (and a hard drive crash that showed them the necessity) solely because of the ease of Time Machine.
Time Machine is an EXCELLENT solution for the 85-90% of people that weren't backing up before because at least it gets them some kind of backup.
Using it on a 500GB external, and Super-Duper on a now defunct 5th Gen iPod (because the battery is dead and I have an iPhone) is the perfect solution for me. But I agree, give me more options and more control if I want it!

>As for restoring from a crash with Time Machine, when you boot from the Leopard Install CD (or recovery CDs for a recent >Mac) you can select from the menu "Restore from Time Machine Backup..." This recovers the full machine, and I used it to >migrate from one machine to another, much faster than a file-by-file copy of migration.

This definitely resolves my issue with "How do I restore my drive with Time Machine" question. While I don't think it's easy to discover this feature, it seems, on the surface, to be an easy method.

It doesn't resolve my issue with the hard drive filling up rapidly with audio and video files being duplicated every time I edit them.

I don't buy the "better safe than sorry" argument at all in regards to Time Machine's behavior of needing to be told what not to backup versus what to backup. It's simply stupid to have to tell it not to back up hundreds of other folders when all I want is to back up a single project folder. That aspect of Time Machine is not easy. It's a hassle, which is what WIndows is and is why I don't use Windows.

Having never having a problem where I needed to do a restore, I've never had to put Time Machine, (or anything else for that matter,) to the test but, when I installed Leopard, I did notice that there is a way to access Time Machine from the DVD, have you tried using that to do a restore?

I use Time Machine to backup to my 400 GB external, but sometimes get an error the next morning -- but not always. My Apple store genius said to not put anything on the backup drive other than backups, but I was trying to save space on my Mac. HD by putting things other than programs on the BU drive. Now how do I get all that other stuff moved back to my Mac HD? Or I'll put a second external HD on for all the other stuff, but same problem -- how do I move it off my backup HD to the 2nd external drive so I can only have backups on my 1st external HD. I have a new 24" iMac with both 400 and 800 Firewire, but external cases I can find only support 400 Firewire with an internal e-SATA drive. But I would like my backup to be 800, with other external drives okay to be at 400. What to do? Actually I'm not happy with time machine -- I only need one copy of videos on my backup drive, not stored over and over again just in case it changed, which of course it never does. Also I would like a complete backup overnight, deleting older archive files afterwards as unneeded. But the user engaged sleep function sleeps both my computer and the monitor function, disabling anything happening overnight. All I want sleep to do is to sleep the monitor to save power, but leve the low power requiring CPU in active state for overnight backups, etc. I set my preferences to do that when things time out, but I want to manually sleep the monitor when I retire from using the computer, while leaving the CPU active, but I don't know how to do that. Charles Wilkes, San Jose, Calif.