I have to say, as a backup tool, I like Carbon Clone Copier a lot better than Time Machine. The cool thing about CCC is that when you want to clone your hard drive again or update your clone per say, it'll only update the files that have been changed or updated. Time Machine backs up your entire drive over and over again, then you run out of spacer a lot sooner than expected.
I would have to look it up to be sure, but I remember reading reviews of Time Machine before/just as Leopard was released and I don't believe this to be the case. It should be performing file based incremental backups (any file/folder that has changed or is new since the last backup will get copied in its entirety).
It is true that when you are in Time Machine looking at your backups you can see your entire hard drive the way it looked for each backup instance. This is due to the way Time Machine presents the backup to you (symbolic links, I think it's called), but I am about 99% sure it does not do a full backup every time.
If you use Entourage for e-mail of have virtual machines, it is true that this can cause backups to get very large quickly (Entourage stores all data in a single file, and VMs are commonly a single file, so a new e-mail or booting a VM will prompt a full backup of your 3GB Entourage data or your 20GB VM). Time Machine does allow exceptions, which I would think would be advisable for any very large files that are modified often.
Time Machine is certainly not perfect, but it is a great leap forward in encouraging and enabling the average end user to have a data backup that is very easy to recover in the case of a catastrophic hardware failure of the user's computer.
And just this week Time Machine made upgrading to a new hard drive extremely easy. I'm a support professional, but if I can just plug in my external and my backup works 97% of the way I want it, I ain't gonna fight it. Happy to use it.
Cheers.
