Do I need 500GB or 1TB?

Hi. I have an iMac w/ 500GB drive and am going to purchase a MacBook with 250 GB drive. I don't know whether to buy a 500gb or 1tb Time Capsule.
I know that 500GB + 250GB = 750GB, and that common sense tells me I should buy a 1TB Time Capsule. But I've had others tell me that because a.) Time Machine compresses the backups and b.) it's unlikely that I'm going to fill up both drives that I only need the 500GB Time Capsule.
I don't mind buying 1TB, but don't want to spend the extra $200 if I don't need that much.
Any advice would be VERY much appreciated.
- Ryan

It should be noted that TM backupd process will pad the aggregate of data to be backed up by approx 20%. It does this to protect itself from the horrors of hitting disk full conditions during a backup.
Thus, if say the aggregate size of the initial backup is 400 GB then, TM backup will look for 400+80 GB of disk space before it will attempt its backup. This really is only significant for the initial backup as it quite likely will be the biggest amount of data to be backed up in one shot.
If you're backing up two computers today, consider tomorrow when you might add a third one.
Let's say you use 2/3 of each HDD. That's 250+125 GB or some 375 GB. Also let's say you your weekly data churn is 2 GB. Thus over 1 year your data churn is 52x2 GB or 104 GB. Add this to the base of 375 GB and you arrive at 480 GB. So a 500 GB TC might last you for a year before TM starts needing more space and will start removing your oldest weekly snapshots.
Now you can play with the numbers all you want to figure out what size of TC to buy.
If I were in your shoes I'd go for the 1 TB TC to allow for some growth. The 500 GB will work for you as well but at the loss of historic data compared to the 1 TB TC when the 500 GB fills up.
As one poster mentioned, how much data history do you want to keep around. You can also exclude data that you feel you can re-install easily from disc/DVDs etc such as 3rd party Applications and even the Mac OS X system files. However, the beauty of TM is that it can be used to re-instate your system to a precise point of time in the past. If you start excluding things you lose some of TM's ease of use and its system recovery features. System files rarely change so they get backed up just once. Of course when you apply a Software Update from Apple this will change some of the system files. Backing up system files allows you to easily back out an Apple software update if for some reason you don't like it. Say you updated from 10.5.1 to 10.5.2 and 10.5.2 turned out to be bad for you. Using the DVD Installer you can easily return to the 10.5.1 state within a few hours.

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