Cur­tis asks:

I bought a new drive and am par­ti­tion­ing it to limit how much Time Machine uses. How big should I make the partition?

Short Answer: I’d say around 25% larger than what your computer’s hard drive size.

Back­ing up is SO impor­tant, and Apple’s new oper­at­ing sys­tem includes a very pow­er­ful and easy to use appli­ca­tion called Time Machine. All you need is an exter­nal drive to backup to, and you’re good to go!

To under­stand how much space you need, you should know how Time Machine works. The first time you backup, it backs up your whole hard drive. From then on when it backs up your com­puter, it only backs up what you’ve changed. Once your backup drive is full, you can set Time Machine to delete old backups.

My lappie’s drive is 120GB and my 160GB backup drive is EASILY big enough!

If you aren’t deleting/adding tons of files on a daily, or even weekly basis, a backup drive that’s slightly big­ger than your hard drive, like 25%, is more than enough. That being said, hard drive space is CHEAP, and you’ll never wish you bought some­thing smaller — A 500GB USB 2.0 drive from Future Shop is only $119!