Time Machine: Must external HDD be a large or larger than internal drive?

I have a 2TB HDD in a new iMac, and I have a couple of spare 500GB SATA drives I can liberate from my previous Mac. Before I buy enclosures for the externals, I'd like to know if TM requires an external drive the same size or larger than the internal drive it is to back up.
Though I have a 2TB internal drive, it has 1.79TB available, and I could probably use a 500GB for quite a while before I need a larger backup drive.
Thanks.
BC
driven

BCDrums wrote:
I have a 2TB HDD in a new iMac, and I have a couple of spare 500GB SATA drives I can liberate from my previous Mac. Before I buy enclosures for the externals, I'd like to know if TM requires an external drive the same size or larger than the internal drive it is to back up.
Though I have a 2TB internal drive, it has 1.79TB available, and I could probably use a 500GB for quite a while before I need a larger backup drive.
If you have only 210 GB on that 2 TB drive, then yes, a 500 GB drive will probably work fine, at least until you put a lot more data on your system.
It does vary a great deal, of course, depending on how you use your Mac. If you frequently change and/or replace a lot of large files, you may fill it up rather quickly; if not, it may not fill up for quite a while.
You might want to review these:
Time Machine Tutorial
How to back up and restore your files
Time Machine Features
and perhaps browse the Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* at the top of this forum.

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