Restoring your Mac from a Time Machine backup

Can anyone tell me how long it should take to first backup a 257 Gb of data with Time Machine? I have a Firewire 2 LaCie HD connected to my Intel Mac Pro, and after one night just 100 Gb were copied.
Is it right?

how will this work on the macbook air? there is only one USB drive..so lets say you back up to an external USB hard drive....but to run the CD you need the port...and you probably can't use remote disk if you have a brand new hard drive because your old one was fried

I had to do this. My old Mac died, and when I got a new one, I just plugged in my Time Machine drive, and everything is pretty much the same as my old Mac. It's a great thing to have.

Marc - It is my understanding that TimeMachine does NOT backup your Windows BootCamp Partition.

If you want to backup and restore your Windows BootCamp Partition, you will need to image your BootCamp Partition to s SEPARATE partition on your external hard disk.

I suggest you use a Windows drive image program like Norton Ghost, DriveSnapshot or DriveImage XML.

My favourite Windows drive imaging programs are Drive Snapshot (Shareware) or DriveImage XML (freeware). In both cases, you will probably need to create a Bart PE CD that includes the Drive Imaging program for restoration.
(FYI -- THE URL for the free DriveImage XML program is http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm )

There is also a Free Mac program that will also image and restore your BootCamp Partition -- winclone (see http://www.twocanoes.com/winclone/ ). But I have not tried it so I can't say how good it is.

@Alya: You do not need to buy an external drive. From what I have seem, you can assign any drive other than the one the O/S is sitting on. So if you have more than 1 drive in your Mac, you can assign it as your backup drive.

@DoctaJay : The answer is yes. I upgraded the drive in my iMac from the 250GB to a 1TB. I then used the leopard cd and time machine to completely restore my system. Within 2 hours I was up and running right where I had left off, just this time with a lot more free space :)

Will time machine create a backup including the boot camp partition (Fat32)? My brother has a defective MBP screen and before he takes it to the apple store I wanted to do a complete system backup. He has a lot of programs that he has to run in boot camp so backing those files up is very important to him.

Another step to make time machine backups even more useful is to copy the leopard install dvd to the time machine drive (use disk utility)

So now I don't even need the DVD to restore from time machine :D just hold alt at startup, with the time machine disk plugged in, and there it is.

Photoshop CS3 threw-up after trying to handle a number of 1GB files I was throwing at it on my iMac C2D but Time Capsule came to the rescue after every attempt to boot from the internal drive failed. Eventually I restarted the internal HD as a firewire drive, copied what I thought had not backed up since the last TM update and hit reinstall from TM. Took 3-4 hours but worked a treat.

Do I have to buy external hard drive in order to use a Time Machine in Mac? That's strange ;-( - if I buy iMac with 320GB, why should I buy another hard drive?
Anyway, Macs are just GREAT!!! :-)
Alya,
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