Need backup hardrive for a Mac

For some reason, the portable hard drive (Iomega) I use to back up my Mac is no longer "showing up" on my desktop when I try to back up my files. No idea why. So I need to buy a new one, especially since this Mac is old and getting feeble and could go belly up at any time.

Walmart has some (Sony) and the new Officeland place by El Torito has some, forget which brand. Do I need to concern myself at all with the specs on one of these? Will they all be compatible with a Mac? Is initializing one of these things completely easy and a no-brainer? The hard drive on my laptop is only 1 Gig so size isn't an issue.

Thanks!

Generally, any external hard drive will be compatible with a Mac, and if formatted properly will be fully compatible. However, there are a lot of factors that will determine how compatible when you initially get it and what you might need to do to make it fully compatible.

First off, is your hard drive really just 1 gig? If so you could just get a usb memory stick for about 200 pesos at Walmart that will hold your backup. My guess though is that it is much larger than 1 gig. Probably 100 gig or larger?

Do you know what version of OSX you are using? What do you use to do your backups? Do you use Time Machine or something else? Sorry for the details, but they will help to answer your question.

If you don't know the answer to these questions, click on the apple in the upper left corner and then click on "About this Mac". That will tell you the OSX version there.

Thanks OasisCloud. I'm seriously stupid when it comes to this stuff, so I very much appreciate your taking the time. Like I said, this is an OLDDDDDD laptop. Yes, previously I've been using "Time Machine" to do my backups. I'm running OS-X 10.5.8....and....here's what the rest of the info says, sans serial # and all that jazz.

Thanks!

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Model Name: MacBook
 Model Identifier: MacBook3,1
 Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
 Processor Speed: 2.2 GHz
 Number Of Processors: 1
 Total Number Of Cores: 2
 L2 Cache: 4 MB
 Memory: 1 GB

Any USB hard drive will work for you. Most external drives will come formatted with what is called "FAT-32" and the mac can write and read to that. However, to get it to work best with your mac you will need to format the drive with the mac format. I think you'd have to do that for Time Machine to work with it. That isn't hard, but best to let someone that knows what they are doing help you. If you buy the new drive from computerland they would probably help you do it. I'd be happy to help if needed, just PM me.