Time machine with WD portable 250gb external hard drive

Question

im using the WD 250GB external hard drive to backup my HD...im very new to MAC and time machine. I have a MacBookPro. My question: do you recommend i back everything up with time machine on this external WD HD? thanks for your help

Answer 1

OK, I understand now. I think the following may be helpful:
Basic Backup
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. PsynchX 2.1.1 and RsyncX 2.1 (Freeware)
6. Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware - 3.0 is a Universal Binary)
7. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
8. Intego Personal Backup (Commercial)
9. Data Backup (Commercial)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.
Although you can buy a complete FireWire drive system, you can also put one together if you are so inclined. It's relatively easy and only requires a Phillips head screwdriver (typically.) You can purchase hard drives separately. This gives you an opportunity to shop for the best prices on a hard drive of your choice. Reliable brands include Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital, Toshiba, and Fujitsu. You can find reviews and benchmarks on many drives at Storage Review.
Enclosures for FireWire and USB are readily available. You can find only FireWire enclosures, only USB enclosures, and enclosures that feature multiple ports. I would stress getting enclosures that use the Oxford chipsets (911, 921, 922, for example.) You can find enclosures at places such as;
Cool Drives
OWC
WiebeTech
Firewire Direct
California Drives
NewEgg
All you need do is remove a case cover, mount the hard drive in the enclosure and connect the cables, then re-attach the case cover. Usually the only tool required is a small or medium Phillips screwdriver.
If you have any questions about this please ask. Obviously you can also use TM as your backup system letting it run with its defaults. TM will initially back up everything. Thereafter it does only incremental backups - it backs up only those files that have changed since the last backup. Currently TM backs up every hour, week, and month. If the backup drive becomes full TM is supposed to remove the earliest version of a file to make space for the latest version. You can find third-party utilities such as TimeMachineEditor or TimeMachine Scheduler - VersionTracker or MacUpdate - that will let you change the schedule intervals if you prefer not to have backups running so frequently. You can also add files and/or folders to an exclusion list in TM for items you don't want to backup such as the /System/ folder.
However, TM cannot make bootable backups. If you want a bootable backup you will need to use something other than TM. Several of the ones I suggest above do bootable backups, incremental backups, scheduled backups, and archival backups.