How do I know TIMEMACHINE is backing up my PICTURES?

[urbantea]

I have 50gb of pics on my mac and they have all been backed up on time machine.

I want to delete my pics on my mac, but i want to make sure that the time machien thing is wroking

how do i verify this? how do i check if my ext harddrive really has my pics??

 

[Ifti]

Move your photos to another area on your hard drive.
Go to the original location and enter time machine restore to see if they are there.

Personally I would also suggest creating a backup of the photos on another external HDD just to be safe. Don't only rely on Time Machine.

 

[flynz4]

Move your photos to another area on your hard drive.
Go to the original location and enter time machine restore to see if they are there.

Personally I would also suggest creating a backup of the photos on another external HDD just to be safe. Don't only rely on Time Machine.

***Very Strongly Agree***

You have backed up your pictures to be sure they are in more than one place. Why would you ever delete either copy and go back to just one copy?

Also... I would not rely on just Time Machine as a single backup destination. I would look at one of the very inexpensive, and secure online backup services. Mozy, Crashplan+, Backblaze, Carbonite all have good reputations. I have used Mozy and Crashplan personally. CP+ is my favorite.

/Jim

 

[Ifti]

I don't trust online backup either. I don't know why, it's not that I've ever even tried it!

I do not store my data on my local laptop either (well, only the mostly accessed stuff). I have all my data stored on my NAS, which is setup in RAID5 for redundancy. This in itself is not a backup solution, it's just my storage, hence the NAS is also backed up to an expansion unit.
I then place a copy of my most important stuff onto an external HDD, which is stored at my workplace.
Hence 2 copies of all data, and 3 copies of the most important stuff you can't get back, like photos!

As a bare minimum (to the OP) I would suggest continuing with your TM backups and also placing your photos onto another external HDD as well, as a bare minimum, before even thinking of removing anything from your laptop!

 

[JediMeister]

Time Machine, by default, backs up everything on the computer. You can exclude specific folders or volumes NOT to be backed up. Unless you have done so, you can rest assured that your files are being backed up. Should you still have doubts, to verify whether Time Machine is backing up, either look in Time Machine preferences for any errors or launch the Time Machine application to browse the backups. I do not recommend opening up the sparsebundle if your backup is on a Time Capsule or the Backups.backup if on an external drive. If you are not careful, you could break the backups and have to start from scratch. Also Time Machine is not a system for archiving. It is a rolling backup, it will compress backups and delete backups over time. This means that if you delete your photos, you may not be able to recover them 6 months or a year or longer down the line.

 

[meirbubba]

Lost pictures and music on Time Machine

I lost everything on Time Machine. Went to apple store and they were no help. They couldn't retrieve any of my files . Years lost. My fault for not having another back up.

 

[MCAsan]

I would suggest not having only one single backup. When my RMBP arrives on Tuesday, I will move all the media file folders (documents, music, pictures,..etc.) from the SSD to a LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt array that will be set up in RAID 1 configuration. So that gives two parallel data copies. The Time Machine will use a Time Capsule to backup the entire computer file system (SSD plus the RAID 1 set). I will do similar for my wife's rMBP when it arrives. Her Time Machine will backup to an external Seagate drive connected to the Time Capsule's USB port.

The next step would be to move backup copies offsite. That could be done via a cloud service or copy to a portable drive(s) that is moved offsite. I have not gotten this far in our plan. Once I get the wife's machine up and running, we will address offsite storage.

 

[Fresh Tendrils]

I have 50gb of pics on my mac and they have all been backed up on time machine.

I want to delete my pics on my mac, but i want to make sure that the time machien thing is wroking

how do i verify this? how do i check if my ext harddrive really has my pics??

This is an awful idea. If your time machine fills up, then it will begin to replace the oldest backups with new backups. If you don't have those photos on your computer, then they will eventually be deleted from your time machine drive.

If you must delete the photos from your computer, then go out and buy an external drive [preferably 2], and copy your photos over to it. You can buy a 320GB external drive for about 50 bucks off Amazon. It's not that expensive, and it could save you a lot of regret and hassle down the road. I know so many people who didn't want to spend the money to properly back up their data and then lost some or all of it forever.

 

[flynz4]

The next step would be to move backup copies offsite. That could be done via a cloud service or copy to a portable drive(s) that is moved offsite. I have not gotten this far in our plan. Once I get the wife's machine up and running, we will address offsite storage.

I would strongly recommend cloud backup. It is very inexpensive and extremely secure. Good services completely encrypt the data on your own machine, with a 448b key that you control.

One key element to a good backup strategy is being fully automatic, with no human intervention.

/Jim

 

[takezo808]

I have 50gb of pics on my mac and they have all been backed up on time machine.

I want to delete my pics on my mac, but i want to make sure that the time machien thing is wroking

how do i verify this? how do i check if my ext harddrive really has my pics??

time machine has successfully restored all my files, apps and everything else. It works really good. It's way better than any backup utility I have used.

however a single point of failure is bad. Alwasy have a secondary backup of things that are very important. Just backup photos to another HDD, they have 1TB portable HDDs availible for under 100 bucks. If they are imported into iphoto, you can actualy have iphoto burn them to DVDs which you could use on any DVD player or BD player. It's a good way to save photos have it availible to share with family other than relying on Face Book.

 

[takeshi74]

Personally I would also suggest creating a backup of the photos on another external HDD just to be safe. Don't only rely on Time Machine.

+1 if you really need more opinions on the matter. If you delete the original files then your backup is no longer a backup. Plus, as stated above several times, you don't want to rely on a rolling backup solution like Time Machine as those backups will be deleted.