Time Machine Question

[phn0rd]

So I understand that Time Machine saves hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month until the volume runs out of space. At that point, Time Machine deletes the oldest weekly backup.

I have a question as to what that means for deleted files.

Let's say that I had a large file that I deleted, oh... September 1st 2014. I deleted it not because I no longer wanted it, but because I didn't want it cluttering my local drive.

Let's say that today my Time Machine backup ran out of space, and it deleted the September 1st 2014 snapshot.

Would I lose that file at that point?

 

[Weaselboy]

Yep...

 

[phn0rd]

Hmmm... I'd much prefer a system that prioritizes keeping the most recent versions of each file, then backups of each file, etc. – over a system that prioritizes keeping the most recent full-system-snapshot, then previous full-system-snapshots, etc.

So like, a system that would sooner get rid of the fifty previous versions of a database file then get rid of a file that there is only one version of, but that version was backed up one-hundred-backups-ago, you know?