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.)
Time Capsule: I must have misread the box.
I can't understand your comments about external drive size (measured in MB).
I've got a 500GB internal drive and info tells me that I'm using 23GB of that. Given that my personal files constitute less than 3GB (including 1GB of music, which I don't really care about), that's 20GB of god-knows-what.
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.
Then I totally misunderstand what it means to back up my stuff. I've only ever wanted to save my personal files — which is what I've done.
What is the point of saving any of the rest of it? I can't make a bootable disk out of it (from all that I've read in the Forums), so that'd be a waste of time and space. And what would be the point of copying all that stuff over and over?
(In the event of a total crash, there would be nothing I could manage anyway, other than to take the machine to the recycling depot.)
