New Mac users forum: Time machine

You may want to consider moving to Leopard, or Snow Leopard, and then find out about Time Machine

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Time Machine uses a lot of hard drive space, not as much as you would expect though, and will auto dump older backups as it needs to.

There is no way to reduce the frequency of the backups, hourly, but it does not keep all those hourly backups.

This from the Apple Site:
"Following the initial backup of your entire Mac, Time Machine automatically makes incremental backups every hour, every day, copying just the files that have changed since your last backup. And it does this all in the background, so you can continue working while Time Machine is busy copying your files. Time Machine saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month."
For more information about Time Machine, go here: http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/time-machine.html

What size is that external you are backing up to?

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don't expect to be using it for anything else/

What Mac?

Have you considered a larger, external drive, as a Time Machine disk?
Prices are very cheap for a 1TB USB drive, not so much for Firewire, but USB is fine as long as you have USB 2.0 in your Mac.

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Have installed and hopefully sorted my problems.