Not clear on Time Machine

[Live Steam]

Time Machine works as an archival program from what I understand of it. To me this means it will go back to date specific times and show the available data at that point in time. So if I delete something today that was archived by TM at an earlier date, will it have that data available to be retrieved tomorrow? Also if this is the case, can I limit the range of dates or time? It seems to me that TM will quickly fill my backup drive if it retains everything that ever crossed into my system. I hope I'm being clear.

 

[Blue Velvet]

You are correct. However, once the drive is full, Time Machine starts warning you and consolidating backups... and it only backs up the changes. As an example, I have a 160Gb drive in my MBP and a 320 external drive as my Time Machine backup, but I have backups going back five months now to the first week of August and the external drive is barely half full.

You can restrict it certain folders if you like, but not a range of times.

More details here.

 

[Live Steam]

You are correct. However, once the drive is full, Time Machine starts warning you and consolidating backups... and it only backs up the changes. As an example, I have a 160Gb drive in my MBP and a 320 external drive as my Time Machine backup, but I have backups going back five months now to the first week of August and the external drive is barely half full.

You can restrict it certain folders if you like, but not a range of times.

More details here.

Thanks for your response and the link. Now I did utilize TM for a few months and then one day the system informed me that the disk was full and TM didn't work after that. So I reformatted and then performed manual backups of my data. That became too tedious so I began to look at other options aside from TM. I recently tried CCC and SilverKeeper. I am also considering giving Chronosync a shot as it would be nice to share the data with my notebook (hackintosh) - did I say that?

Well for now, I'll give TM another try and enable it to do it's thing tonight. The one other question and worry is, are the files available for me to access from another machine should I have problems with my iMac?

 

[Blue Velvet]

The one other question and worry is, are the files available for me to access from another machine should I have problems with my iMac?

Yes they are, provided you set permissions to ignore on the disk if that situation ever arises. It's not a compressed incremental backup that needs an app to decompress and retrieve files, like Retrospect, for instance.

 

[Live Steam]

Thanks again Demi. I guess I'll let it do it's thing for a while. By the way, I like your avatar.

 

[nando2323]

Since we are on the subject.

Ok I had Time Machine working before on a 250GB drive. I wanted a bigger drive but was waiting for it to fill up. So when it did fill up it just kept telling me that the backup cannot complete because there is not enough space. Shouldn't it just delete the oldest backups and just keep backing up, not just stop? Is there a way to put a retention period setting in Time Machine to automatically delete backups that are a set number of days old?