Will Time Machine work?

[sultanoflondon]

Hi all,

For my MacBook Pro, I have a Time Machine set up. Whenever I come home, I plug my Mac into my Time Machine for about an hour which allows one or possibly two backups to take place. Then I unplug it. Sometimes, I plug it into the Time Machine overnight or for an entire evening. My Mac is not connected to my Time Machine indefinitely.

Does this still work? If I wanted to recover a lost file or restore my Mac, would this be possible using this Time Machine set up? I understand that backups are not made every hour and that the Time Machine backup would not have any changes made between the last backup and the time that I wanted to recover a file or restore my Mac.

Thank you!

 

[BrianBaughn]

Yes, it still works like that.

Know that if you leave Time Machine ON when the backup drive is disconnected that it will create local snapshots on your computer. Read this support page.

 

[sultanoflondon]

Yes, it still works like that.

Know that if you leave Time Machine ON when the backup drive is disconnected that it will create local snapshots on your computer. Read this support page.

Thanks, Brian. Really helpful post.

Do you know whether the local snapshots are moved to my Time Machine drive when it is connected? Otherwise local snapshots will be unnecessarily accumulating in my Mac. If not, is it possible to set my Mac to automatically move all local snapshots to the Time Machine drive as soon as it is connected for the first time after last time?

Thanks again!

 

[BrianBaughn]

I don’t know the answer to that but I suspect the snapshots would be moved to the TM drive...following the normal convention of how they’re organized.

 

[Weaselboy]

Do you know whether the local snapshots are moved to my Time Machine drive when it is connected? Otherwise local snapshots will be unnecessarily accumulating in my Mac. If not, is it possible to set my Mac to automatically move all local snapshots to the Time Machine drive as soon as it is connected for the first time after last time?

No they won't be moved over. They will just accumulate until the disk gets close to full then get purged off automatically.

sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

If you run this command you can see the snapshots.

sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots / 1000000000 4

You can run this command to get rid of them. You may need to run it more then once, depending on how many you have.

Prior to HS you could disable these local snapshots, but there does not appear to be a way to do that in HS.

 

[Honza1]

FYI: On my machine local snapshots DO NOT accumulate, I always have ~ 24 hours of local snapshots. TM removes the older ones automatically, I have not done anything to provoke this, so this should be default behavior. OSX 10.13.1.