09-10-2009, 05:05 PM

I was loking at time machine and I'm confused. Let me get this straight. If I use TM, the first backup will take a long time (of course) after that it will backup according to a schedule. Now for the confusing part, it says there that it will keep the most recent data for one month? What happens to my data after one month even though the backup disk is not full? Will it delete it? I will be using TM mostly for backing up on MY schedule i.e. every time I plug my backup disk and DECIDE to backup, this may be every week or so, Any thought on this?

09-10-2009, 10:20 PM

Time Machine will keep the backup schedule that it lists in the preference pane. When the backup disk starts to get full it will delete the oldest backup in order to make room on the media.

Keep in mind that very old backups are only useful if there is a particular version of a file or program that you want to restore. Otherwise, backups more than about two weeks old should be for archive purposes only. You certainly would not want to restore a very old backup in the event of a system crash.

If you wish to use a schedule other than what Time Machine provides, you can try the free "Time Machine Scheduler" program instead. Download from here.

Regards.

09-11-2009, 01:26 AM

Thanks for the reply. Well I was going to use TM to backup documents that are edited often pretty much daily, and archive my dvd library there too. So basically those dvd's will be safe and NOT be deleted until the disk begins to get full... correct? Regardless of how old are they i.e. a week or a few months right? I will usually plug and unplug my ext. hd every night and wait and let it backup by itself, so as far as that schedule goes I think I'm fine.

09-11-2009, 02:53 AM

You could just leave your external drive plugged in all the time and have automatic hourly backups. It doesn't back up everything every time, just what's been changed since the last one.

09-11-2009, 02:40 PM

Originally Posted by cad2blender

Thanks for the reply. Well I was going to use TM to backup documents that are edited often pretty much daily, and archive my dvd library there too. So basically those dvd's will be safe and NOT be deleted until the disk begins to get full... correct? Regardless of how old are they i.e. a week or a few months right? I will usually plug and unplug my ext. hd every night and wait and let it backup by itself, so as far as that schedule goes I think I'm fine.

Yes, you should be fine. Just be aware of the remaining space on the external hard drive used for TM backups. Just for info.... That's pretty much what I do for my TM schedule. I unplug the drive and plug it back in when it's time to make another backup. Since I also use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable backup of my hard drive every two or three days, I can recover from most emergencies.

Regards.