Originally Posted By: grelber
The Apple Time Machine external drive is $500 here.

That must be for the Time Capsule, which is overkill for an iMac. You don't need that. Any external drive will do. Firewire is better than USB, but USB will do. Get one with about twice the capacity as the data you expect to have on your drive. (If you've got a 1TB internal drive, with 200MB on it which might grow to 250MB, you should look for at least 500MB. By the time you outgrow that, 20TB drives will sell for pennies.)

Originally Posted By: grelber
I looked at the Time Machine application which came with my iMac and I understand absolutely nothing about it.

It's really easy. You plug in the drive, and TM will ask "Can I use it?" You click on "Yes", and you're using it.

Originally Posted By: grelber
My backups have been solely content-oriented, by which I mean I save my documents on a CD from time to time (but my Toast Titanium won't work here), so I imagine — if I can ever figure out how the CD/DVD burner on this machine works — that I might be able to use that.

Sounds good enough in theory, but believe me, in practice it's woefully inadequate. If you're doing it manually, you aren't backing up.