[X4U] Time Machine for two Installations of Macosx

[Cheryl Ann Homiak]

I am running a Mac mini with an 80gb hard drive. I also have 2 1 TB usb 
drives and a 250 GB firewisre drive. I have Snow Leopard installations on 
all four drives (some of which were created by superduper) and I also have 
Time Machine aon one of the drives co-existing with the bootable super 
duper-created installation. I have three questions:

(1) If I start up time Macine to run when I am booted into one of the 
installations, will Time Machine also run when I boot into one of my other 
startup disks or are those preferences specific to the particular 
installation from which I started time machine?

(2) Can I set up Time Machine to do its backup to different drives based 
on which startup disk I'm using. What I want to do is have Time Machine 
for my hard drive use the firewire drive for saving backups but have time 
Machine save its backups to one of the usb drives when I am running the 
installation on the other usb drive. Will the preferences for the two 
startup disks be differentiated to the correct one of the backup drives or 
am I going to have to unplug one backup drive to make sure Time Machine 
saves to the other one?

(3) Is it worth using Time Machine for a large installation? When I backed 
up an installation on one of the 1TB drives using SuperDuper, it took 
several hours and of course the new installation was a fully-working one 
and not compressed. A time Machine backup of the same drive would also 
probably take quite a bit of time and I'm wondering if the compression 
ratio is low enough to make keeping a Time Machine backup realistically 
helpful or if the Time Machine backups for a large drive are going to fill 
up the backup drive too quickly to make it worthwhile.
Thanks.


-- 
Cheryl

"Let the words of my mouth,
and the meditation of my heart,
be acceptable in thy sight,
O LORD, my strength and my Redeemer."

(Psalm 19:14: Bible KJV)