time machine

[melow71]

okay i just bought a new HD and am using time machine.. does this program continually back up material it has already backed up.. .and thus eat more and more data on the external...??? it seems that it just makes the same copies of the same things??? that is stupid.. eats HD space for nothing... am I doing something wrong??/ and also I want to delete things sometime, how would I do that in TIME machine.. because it seems like it is making that pretty difficult to do??

thanks again guys

 

[the8thark]

Well time machine works like this:

It on first use copies your entire hard drive over to the external. And on subsequent backups it will copy over only the newly modified files. But not over write them. So you can chose to restore which ever version of the file you want. Be it yesterdays one or last weeks one etc.

But the only catch is this all takes up space, and when the space is used up on the external, Time Machine will slowly delete the oldest versions of files to make way for the new incoming ones. So you always have the most current version (edits) of your files if you need them for a reason.

And for me I'd just use an entire external for time machine. I wouldn't put anything else on it. Then you have no worry about space or things being used etc. Just make sure the external is at least 2x as large as the the amount of used space on your internal hard drive and everything will work just fine.