I’ve used Time Machine once or twice, and I LOVE it…it was actually one of the things I was most excited about with the release of Leopard (that and Spaces, which I used for about a week before realizing it was just more confusing than useful).

My problem is that I am pretty much anathema to external hard disks (when I’m not busy destroying internal ones, that is!). I’ve owned two and neither survived beyond the warranty period, mostly due to my dropping them on hardwood floors. (In comparison, I dropped my MacBook down the stairs and it didn’t seem to mind in the least.)

I’d probably use the crap out of Time Machine if I could only back it up to my great big huge ftp storage space, but it doesn’t do this, and I don’t understand why not…. seems like it’d be an easy functionality to add!

For now I’m just using the command-line ftp solution. It runs in the background every night, I don’t have to think about it, or plug anything in, and my data’s stored somewhere far enough away from me that I don’t have a chance of destroying it! (I hope!)

I have a mac with a 60GB hard disk, and a 500GB backup disk, and backups since april have only used up 1/5th of the disk.
The great thing about Time Machine, is that although it backs up every hour, it stores only the changes to the disk in that time, so each backup doesn’t use the whole size of your hard disk.
Another great feature is that hourly backups are kept only for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and only weekly backups for everything older than a month, so your hard disk shouldn’t fill up too fast.

Hmm, sorry that sounds too much like a sales pitch now, whoops.
:P

i just recently found & implemented this:
http://addisonrd.com/WordPress/2007/03/how-to-backup-your-mac-to-a-dreamhost-server-part-1-of-2/
that looks sort of fantastic, and is (almost) exactly what i want. or actually, dreamhost does keep backups of your files, too, so it’s even (sort of, hackily) versioned … though i’m just telling it NOT to delete things, thank you very much!

i’m going to give it a try & see how it goes…. last time i setup an automated backup, it ran via ftp and got confused & stalled on me ALL the time. this looks much more promising!