Time Machine Questions

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Jul 15, 2010
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I have a 500gb hard drive in my 13" unibody macbook pro. I have a 500gb WD portable firewire 800 external drive that I am doing my Time Machine backups on.

Am I understanding correctly that time machine is an incremental backup and only write changes to new files, and that it is an illusion that there is actually a week of backups when they are just a snapshot of what the current backup looked like on that day.

If I am correct the "snapshot" from a week ago should not take up any disk space. Like if I have a 27 July backup and time machine goes back to 20 July, that 20 July doesn't take up space it just shows the file difference between 27 July and 20 July? Is this correct?

Or if a file is deleted on 26 July and was there on 20 July is it not really a snapshot? Would that deleted file still be in the "snapshot".

The point of all this is can I limit how many days back time machine holds these "snapshots"?

I think I need to stop there because I may be starting to confuse myself.
 

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