Apple recently launched some new MacBook Pros, touting them as a breakthrough, through and through. These new notebooks came with a revolutionary connectivity port known as Thunderbolt.
If you have not heard of Thunderbolt, it was previously known as Light Peak. Apple and Intel joined hands, collaborating and came up with somewhat a replacement for USB 2.0. Note that Apple has yet to implement USB 3.0 on any of it’s devices, and with the Thunderbolt MacBook Pros, it seems that USB 2.0 will be the last version. For more on Thunderbolt, check out this great piece over at Apple Insider.
Now, that brings me to today’s post topic regarding Time Machine and backups.
I’ve been using my MacBook Pro for about a year plus now. And Time Machine has been helping keep all my data intact. In fact, if I’d like to do some time travelling, Time Machine will gladly transport me back to some time in 2009! That’s amazing, isn’t it.
However, all these came at a price. My current backup drive, which is a 320 GB Western Digital My Passport external 2.5″ hard drive has already run out of space! All 320 GB of space is being occupied by nothing but my Time Machine backups. I can’t store anything else on this particular drive – it is not recommended that you store any other data on your dedicated Time Machine backup anyway. Overall, I’m a happy camper.
I have another Mac mini at home which I use as a backup machine. I have yet to set a backup for this machine, having used it for a year now. 
Since hard drive prices has come down, I thought I’d just get myself a new backup drive for the Mac mini. As with my previous 320 GB drive, I tried hunting for FireWire equipped drives. It’s like looking for a needle in the haystack. Computer retailers seem to choose USB over FireWire anytime.
At long last, I resorted to simply getting a 500 GB USB 2.0 equipped drive. I do not have a need for anything faster (read: USB 3.0) for the fact that my Mac mini won’t be able to support it.
I store quite a lot of data on the Mac mini, including a large number of movies and tracks that I’ve downloaded from iTunes. With that in mind, I opt to have Time Machine perform backups on my data partition instead of the entire drive. This should give me more room to breathe as well as more backups. If you’d like to do that for your own Time Machine backup, then take a look at this forum thread over at MacRumors.
