I have recently moved up to Leopard - does switching Time Machine on have any effect on the overall performance of the system? In other words does everything slow down and if so to what extent? Thanks

on using first time TM the process will be slow

from 2nd time on wards everything is normal no effect on performance , but if I backing up large files like 4Gb files it will make my system a little bit slower than normal

these are my experiences using TM, mary vary from person 2 person

I'm running it on a Mac mini 1.83ghz CoreDuo the only perception of something happening is the drive writing on the external drive... there seems to be no degradation in performance.

It might be worth your while to read this article I wrote on Time Machine.

In my experience though, if I leave my Mac off/sleeping overnight, when I switch it on in the morning, there's a brief period of slowness as old hourly backups are purged.

I haven't noticed much of a performance kick (Granted I store very little on my mac).

However the Time Machine drive can hammer a bit when it is indexing.

Thanks for the info.

After you've done your first backup you'll probably never notice it going. Although you may hear your external Hard drive spin up every hour when it does a backup.

I have it going all day and I never notice apart the drive humming a bit.