How do I start all over?

Question

Prior to upgrading to Leopard I used Super Duper for backups. I particularly liked the ability to boot directly to the backup. In case of a HD failure this is priceless; You're back up in the time it takes to reboot.
When I upgraded to Leopard, my initial plan was to keep doing the Super Duper backups and just use TM for data files, which wouldn't amount to much in terms of storage. I found it difficult, however, to list everything except Documents as exclusions. Even when I tried to do that, once I began the backup process the system said it was going to back up near 20 GB. Could it have just been reading my HD to determine where the files were and had so far read 20 GB? My documents files take up less than 2 GB. At the time I didn't have a lot of extra extra space on the external HD, so after a few minutes I pulled the plug.
I've now decided that even though I will continue to do the Super Duper backups, there are good reasons to just let TM back up everything. I now have the space to do that. So my question is, how do I get this process going again? Do I just remove the excluded files from the TM interface and fire it up again? Do I have to delete anything? There is a file on the external drive called Backups.backupdb. Under it is a file with my user name and under that a file that what looks like a document with the date and time and ending with ".InProgress". Interestingly enough, the size of that file is 1.75 GB. I haven't tried retrieving anything because I doubt that there's anything there.
So the question is how best to proceed at this point?
Bill

Answer 1

Hi Bill
I would do the following. Clone the Tiger image temporarily somewhere, erase the whole hard drive in Disk Utility and create two partitions, the first/top one Time Machine and the lower/second one "Tiger" or something. Make the second one just big enough for the Tiger image to give as much as possible for the Time Machine drive. Then put Tiger back and connect TM.
I have always used TM on partitioned drives and it causes no problem afaik. However to ensure flexibility, TM should be on the top/first partition because that is the partition you can dynamically resize should TM need more space in the future. This will, however, erase the second partition so before doing any such resizing in the future, please remember to clone the Tiger partition somewhere if you want to keep it.
Now if you only want to backup your documents folder then, afaik, there's no easy way to do this. I would go to Sys Prefs-TM-Options, press '+' and navigate to your boot drive. Select all folders except Users. Click OK. Then repeat this but in your User folder and exclude all but the Documents folder. This ought to give you a backup of only Documents. Perhaps this is what you did?
It is true as Chris says, that TM may fill a drive very quickly unless one takes care to exclude (if that is how one wants to use it). However purely for documents it won't do so and so your setup should be fine. But to give you more flexibility in the future, a bigger drive would of course be useful.
/p