Använda Time Machine för att säkerhetskopiera enstaka mappar?

One of the beauties of Time Machine is that there's nothing magical about the backup volume (assuming it's on a local disk). It's a plain vanilla HFS+ (journaled) volume. For reading purposes, the journaling won't matter. The only problems I can foresee are:

* The disk itself is probably partitioned using GPT (GUID Partition Table), which your older software might not be able to mount. Software that doesn't recognize GPT will think it's partitioned using MBR (Master Boot Record) with a single zero-sector partition (or no partitions at all).

* If you're using FileVault, your home folder is encrypted, and gets backed up that way.

* If you're backing up across a network, such as to a Time Capsule, your backup is to a sparse bundle. Sparse bundles are new with 10.5, so older software won't even know how to mount them.

* Time Machine makes extensive use of ACLs, extended attributes, and hard links. Those have all been part of the HFS+ spec from the beginning, but weren't used much before 10.5, and except for hard links to files weren't used at all before 10.4, so software to support HFS+ on non-Mac systems may not support them properly.

* The user ids, and therefore file ownership, won't match across different boot volumes. This is a problem even on a Macintosh with multiple bootable volumes. You may have to tell Windows to ignore permissions on the volume. I don't know how to do that.