time machine & manual backups

[4now]

Hi
I have a MBP 120G laptop

and an external drive 500G

I'm not sure how time machine works yet - I see a single file being created on my External Hard drive.

Part of the reason I have a Backup drive is to unload folders from my laptop that I've finished working on. So I'm putting these into a single folder on my external.

will the time machine file keep growing - until at some point I may run out of room for the folders that I am storing on the HD

should it be partitioned to reserve space ??

any ideas on how to manage this

thanks

 

[LtRammstein]

That's the beauty of Time Machine. What it does is backs up files every hour until your external is full, then starts to rewrite older dates with new dates. That backup file is what the Time Machine program uses to access your data. Best read more about it from Apple's website. http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html

I don't recommend partitioning the external, because that may cause Time Machine to malfunction. If you just want to backup data that you work on, best use a backup software.

Time Machine is a sync backup.

 

[MurphyM]

On my external I can browse all the files of my backups, I don't see it as a single file. I'm not sure I know what you're looking at.

Interesting thing I've noticed: Time Machine keeps hourly backups for the last 24 hours and daily backups for the last month. But the one it saves as the daily is the first backup of the day, not the last.

In other words: I add a file at 11pm on Monday. On Friday I look at Time Machine. The file isn't in the daily for Monday. It's in there for Tuesday though.