Time Machine only keeps one back up

[PruneTracy]

Hi everyone-
if this has been addressed, please point me in the right direction, as i've searched and searched the forums, but have yet to find a good answer. 🙁

So, i've got a nice new external hooked up to my AEBS and it backs up every hour just like it's supposed to, but that's all it keeps. it's still got 166.7gb available, so it's not a space issue. can anyone out there in macrumors land help me?

you guys/gals are the best!

 

[dejo]

What leads you to believe there's only one backup?

 

[PruneTracy]

What leads you to believe there's only one backup?

i can't go 'back in time':
look at this-

only today, i can't go back on the bar on the right, nor can i see any of my previous backups

 

[motulist]

Time machine is very smart, every time it backs up your drive it only saves copies of the things that have changed since the last backup.

For example, if you have a totally filled up 50 GB internal hard drive and a 200 GB external backup drive, that doesn't mean time machine can only store 4 versions of how your disk was on only 4 different times in the past! Once it makes its initial 50 GB backup, if you then open up a 1 MB text file and make major changes to it, then all TimeMachine adds to the backup is that 1 MB files that has changed since the last backup.

EDIT: So TimeMachine not having old versions of the particular folder you pasted above has nothing to do with TM not backing up until all available space on the backup drive is full. The problem probably comes from either the fact that nothing has changed in that folder since you initially turned on time machine, or the folder in question is in a place that TM is selected to exclude, or some other situation like that.