This thread started out in "Folder behavior" in
Mac OS X 10.6.x & 10.7.x, in case a history is needed.
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.)
Just before my copy of Pogue's book arrives, I've been scoping out various external hard drives.
There seem to be a whole host available, mostly USB (including USB 3), all of which need to be reformatted for Leopard and Snow Leopard (meaning that nothing is going to be formatted for Lion — and I wouldn't have a clue how to do any of that anyway).
I have yet to find a Firewire drive.
In any event, what exactly would be necessary to make use of this Time Machine function in my iMac? What frequency of backup might be warranted? And what might I use such backups for (since a crash of the iMac can't ostensibly be corrected by a backup, at least as far as I can comprehend the discussion in that thread).
In light of the foregoing, what brand names and models do FTM folk recommend? I'd like to keep the price reasonable, preferably (well) under a hundred bucks.
