Leopard Experience--Time Machine Needs 2X Disk Space? Nope

[10/27] [Updated] Leopard Experience--Time Machine Needs 2X Disk Space? Nope

We've got Leopard up and running on our 15" 2.4GHz MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo (LED) and 24" 2.8GHz aluminum iMac Core 2 Duo. We used an Archive and Install installation option on the former and an Upgrade installation option on the latter. We've let Spotlight re-index our drives and set up Time Machine to work on external FireWire 800 drives, a 570GB dual drive for our MacBook Pro with about 150GB on its internal drive and a 320GB single drive for our iMac with about 35GB on its internal drive.

Time Machine took up 300GB of the external drive for our MacBook Pro and 70GB of the external drive for our iMac, two times the space on their respective internal drives but it's really cool! Update: Does this 2X use mean that Time Machine's overhead is 100 percent? Fortunately, the answer is no. We have discovered that Time Machine not only backs up your internal hard drive but also any device with data on it that is attached to your Mac. So the 300MB use by Time Machine on our MacBook Pro also included over 150GB of data on another external drive that we used for .Mac Back Up backups and manual backups of our Parallels Windows XP and Vista virtual machines.

Furthermore, if you don't want Time Machine to keep track of your entire hard disk drive, go to System Preferences->Time Machine->Options and highlight (select) the backup drive then click on the "+" sign button and you can exclude folders and files from Time Machine. [Bill Fox & Dana Baggett]