Time Machine back-ups are using up my entire external HDD

[macrlz9]

I'm surprised no one has noticed that yes it does back up every hour, but then it will eventually keep the newest from that day & delete the rest. So even though you will see hourly backups for a 24 hour period, time machine will delete them at the end of the day, & keep one backup per day, & so on for weekly, & monthly... For example see the screenshot of my TM backup that has hourly for the past couple days, but then only one per day before that since Oct 27... Back in late october & early november, I had hourly backups as well, & they were deleted as time goes on.... Gosh this is really hard to explain & i feel like i'm spinning in circles lol, but i hope this makes some sense.

 

[CavemanUK]

I'm surprised no one has noticed that yes it does back up every hour, but then it will eventually keep the newest from that day & delete the rest. So even though you will see hourly backups for a 24 hour period, time machine will delete them at the end of the day, & keep one backup per day, & so on for weekly, & monthly... For example see the screenshot of my TM backup that has hourly for the past couple days, but then only one per day before that since Oct 27... Back in late october & early november, I had hourly backups as well, & they were deleted as time goes on.... Gosh this is really hard to explain & i feel like i'm spinning in circles lol, but i hope this makes some sense.

Yeah this is something that could catch people out and im not sure how apple should proceed with this scenario but basically if last monday morning I spend a few hours working on an important document and it gets accidently erased in the afternoon, I wont be able to retrieve the file if i notice its missing a few days later because the final backup for the day wont have the file?

Unless Time Machine is clever enough to compile the daily backup from all files that exist throughout the day regardless of whether they exist in the final daily backup.

 

[macrlz9]

Yeah this is something that could catch people out and im not sure how apple should proceed with this scenario but basically if last monday morning I spend a few hours working on an important document and it gets accidently erased in the afternoon, I wont be able to retrieve the file if i notice its missing a few days later because the final backup for the day wont have the file?

Unless Time Machine is clever enough to compile the daily backup from all files that exist throughout the day regardless of whether they exist in the final daily backup.

Good point, i'm not quite sure, but i surely did notice that the hourly backups aren't saved forever...

 

[daniel huxtable]

so i partitioned my external but i also created an image of my leopard boot disc on the same partition as where my Time Machine files are. my question is once my external gets filled up will Time Machine the override the image of the Leopard disc or will it just override the old backups?