Back up question - Time Machine or external hard drive

[sbudhraja]

I am trying to figure out how to keep back ups of pics/videos from my MacBook and be able to keep a certain amount of disk space free on my MacBook.

As I understand it, Time Machine makes a backup of snapshot of the Mac. If I delete any files from my Mac (to create space) after they have been backed up in a snapshot, those files will not be in the next backup in Time Machine.

I want to be able to add files in specific folders to my MacBook, back them up to the external device such that it gets incrementally updated with new files and be able to delete files on MacBook to create space on my HD.

Any suggestions on how to do this with fast and reliable backups? Looks like Time Machine does not allow this. Even if a file is one of the older back ups and I want to restore it, there will be no easy way to keeping track of which snapshot has the specific file.

 

[nightlong]

The answer I think is several hard drives. This is what I do:

on one usb3 drive partitioned I do Time Machine and Carbon Copy Clone backups, so all mymacbook air apps, system, most important past and present files on there. An another drive, time machine backup of my iMac. On another, a master file of all my media - pix, videos, music, talking books, and old files. So I take from there what I want to the computers and to ipad, and delete from them when I don't want those things there. My favourite music, along with some talking books also on my iPod which is mostly in my car.
As my media master file drive is getting old, I'm going to back all of that up to a new usb3 drive soon.

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And, my ipad2 is backed up to iMac, my iPhone 5 backed up to the Air, and iPad 4 will also be backed up to the Air. So they get backed up to time machine from there.

 

[sbudhraja]

What SW to use for back up of media files only?

Thanks for the reply. What SW do you use or recommend for creating a master back up of media files...that is what I really need. The media files is what keeps taking up hard drive space on the laptop - pics, videos etc.

I have been using WD anywhere back up with an external HD but its really really slow in backing up - even if only a few additional files need to be backed up in the same folder.