Question on Time Machine

Hey guys, I have been an owner of two Macs now, and I am just about to get into using Time Machine. I have a question about Time Machine, so I hope you guys can help me out here.

I am thinking about getting a 320G or 500G external hard drive. From my understanding, Time Machine saves "copies" of your entire computer from different times, and keeps everything there in place if you need to find something from the past. Right now, according to iStat Pro, I have used up 126.5G of the capacity on my iMac, so does that mean that Time Machine will make copies it over and over again, given that I do not add or erase anything from this point on? What if it runs out of space to back up, will it erase older versions of the content and put in new ones?

it will copy the full 126gigs the first update, but after that it pretty much only updates the files that are changed. I have about 80gigs of stuff in my hard drive and have been using time machine for about a year on a 500gig external drive, and still have 100gigs to go before it gets full.

once it is full, as far as i know, it will delete older versions to make room for new, but not the oldest. it will just gap them out to once a month instead of once a week or day.

It will just update files that have been deleted or moved from the area they were first in, as 'nZa' said.

Do I have a choice when it comes to backing up once a day, per week or per month, and are those the only choices? Can I choose to back up once every, say, two weeks?

Let's say I want to use my external hard drive for other purposes, and I plug it out and stuff like that. When I plug it back, while it resume the back up process or will it start over?

Yes, you have complete choice over when you want it to backup.

And if it was in the middle of a backup and you removed the External HD, it would start the process over again once it is connected again.

Mr Macintosh said:

Yes, you have complete choice over when you want it to backup.

And if it was in the middle of a backup and you removed the External HD, it would start the process over again once it is connected again.

Click to expand...

By that do you mean a COMPLETE back up all over again or will it pick up from where it stopped?

And is it possible for someone to make a screen cap of how the files in the external hard drive look like with Time Machine?

You can take screen captures

It will start over again if you choose it to do so.
It will come up with a notification windows that will say whether you want it to resume later, or whether you want it to stop and start over.
But usually, it will automatically start a new backup when the External HD is reconnected.

yes it is possible to take a screen cap.

Here is a screen capture I did when I was in Time Machine of some backups.

By the way, you can set Time Machine to not backup certain parts of your file system in order to use your backup drive's space more effectively. For example, backing up your System folder might be wasteful of your backup space, since after a system crash you would just be reloading all of that from the OS X Leopard installation disks anyway. You can go into the Time Machine Options dialog to add these kind of backup exceptions.

And by the way, did I mention, to take a screen cap, it's:
cmd-shift-3