I'm about to start taking Time Machine seriously. I've been years without a real backup strategy.
Last time I had a working backup strategy I was using a tape drive which could store 2GB (IIRC) on a DAT cartridge. It's been ages since I could afford most repairs, much less really useful peripherals, so I only just now picked up a 1TB USB SSD for my backup drive, and will be getting a 250GB USB SSD for some duplicate backups.
Now, none of the disks I'm backing up is all that large -- I have *very* little use for music files and almost none for video, so I could easily back up several disks on those SSDs, **IF** there's not some problem with splitting at least one of the backup disks into partitions so I can put backups for two or three different OSs on the same disk.
Anyone know of potential problems here ? Do I have to set up the drive a certain way, other than using Disk Tools to create the partitions ? I don't anticipate needing to boot off of either one of these drives, so that might limit any problems. I've actually got several boot drives with Linux (Manjaro or Linux Lite) and WinXP (basically retired) on the same drive, or multiple installations of Linux distros, and even a Mac Pro which formerly had seven partitions (OSX 10.7 and 10.9 and various Linux distros) on one disk, but I wasn't really using Time Capsule and I don't know what to expect there.
Any suggestions on little details I should be sure to do, or not to do ??
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Time machine should happily back up to a partition on an external disk, as long as you've formatted it for a Mac filesystem. Don't even think about trying to get it to use a Windows NT or DOS or Linux partition 
Btw, things to think about:
- Maybe encrypt the backup. Time machine can save to an encrypted backup, but you have to set it up that way when you start the backups, not after you've been using it for a while. Consider the panic of having your backup drive stolen.
- You can easily exclude directories in time machine so you don't waste time/space backing up files you can easily recreate from other sources.
- You can have multiple backup drives and it'll round-robin the backups. Disks fail, even backup disks.
- Many external disks are bus-powered and small enough to easily fit in a bank safe-deposit box. Consider a small fire (or flood) in the room that houses both your computer and backup disks. Consider occasional swapping with an offsite. Or copy the most important files into the cloud as well as time machine.
One other word of advice I'd have is to have time machine show it's status in the system menu bar, and try and avoid sleeping or powering off the machine if it's in the middle of a backup. Also there's a "feature" where you can only easily trigger a backup (Back Up Now) via the time machine system menu.
Humor: I still miss my 8mm Exabyte tape drive. 2Gig on a cheap tape. Pretty cool for the day.
TM seems like it should be pretty to use, as long as you know what you *want* to do. I just worry how to partition the SSDs I'm using, and whether there's anything I should really avoid.
Those are all useful thoughts. In an ideal world I'd probably use all of them.
