Time machine questions

It will use all available free space, and give it back to you when you need it - don't worry.

 

I'm guessing you're talking about Backups on your boot drive. That's your local Time Machine, a place where items and changes are backed up on your boot drive until you connect your Time Machine drive:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

There are ways to disable this, and the easiest is through Terminal (this works through OS X Mavericks): http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/28/disable-time-machine-local-backups-in-mac-os-x-lion/

Disabling them means that only the most recent version will be backed up to your Time Machine drive when it's connected, or incremental changes if the drive is always connected. This was how Time Machine worked by default from 10.5 to 10.6 and a popular item to turn off to save space on Macs with SSDs.

As for using space on your Time Machine drive, it will keep copies and changes until full, then start deleting the oldest backups first. This allows you to restore different copies of documents over time and even restore your whole computer from an earlier state. For being a low-maintenance thing, it manages itself pretty well.

 

I used this method to partition the TM drive so TM does not use all space - TBH, I wish I didn't because TM is no longer displayed under Devices in Finder until I make it a point to enter TM then quit.


Eventually, I purchased an external 3TB drive from Amazon and connected that to TM. I use that mainly for storage.

Check out these links to partition TM and also reclaim free space so the correct size is shown:
http://hintsforums.macworld.com/showpost.php?p=527067&postcount=25
http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2009/10/18/time-machine-reclaim-space
http://hintsforums.macworld.com/showpost.php?p=527067&postcount=25