Activating "Back Up Now" with Time Machine OFF?

Because I'm not clear on how Time Machine operates when the backup drive is full, I have Time Machine turned OFF and I frequently use the "Back Up Now" capability by clicking on the Time Machine clock on the menu bar. Does that create a full backup every time I invoke it rather than an incremental backup? More importantly, how does Time Machine (when ON) treat the backup data when the backup drive is full? Does it ever perform a complete backup again (other than the initial startup of Time Machine)? Thanks.
Marty T.

I have to imagine that the first time you run Time Machine's Back Up process it will do a complete backup and as long as you are backing up to the same location it's going to do incremental backups.

Doing it this way is probably no different than having TM turned on all the time and have it run on an hourly basis..

Regards

Thanks for the response, however, my original questions still need answers. How does Time Machine handle a backup drive that is full? What is deleted? Does Time Machine ever take a full backup AFTER the initial one? How does "Back it up now" work (full or incremental)? Thanks.

Time Machine Question still unanswered

Mordecai said:

Because I'm not clear on how Time Machine operates when the backup drive is full, I have Time Machine turned OFF and I frequently use the "Back Up Now" capability by clicking on the Time Machine clock on the menu bar. Does that create a full backup every time I invoke it rather than an incremental backup? More importantly, how does Time Machine (when ON) treat the backup data when the backup drive is full? Does it ever perform a complete backup again (other than the initial startup of Time Machine)? Thanks.
Marty T.

Click to expand...

I'm just trying to determine (by the above questions) whether it is better to manually invoke backups (my system does not change much hour-to-hour) or to let Time Machine do its thing every hour.
Marty

imho - just let TM do it's thing. If it doesn't change much hour to hour, then it won't have much to back up hour to hour. It is turned on full time on both our Macs doing backups over wi-fi and I have found the need to stop the backup process maybe a half dozen times during the last approx. 3 years due to it affecting the speed of what I was currently working on.

It makes incremental backups "all the time" after the initial full backup.
Once the drive is full, it deletes the oldest backups.

It does an incremental backup. I leave it off for the majority of the time on my Mini since it has a small 60GB SSD. I use that SSD for applications and a fast working "desktop" for encoding video and the like. Since there are large junk folders and working directories there I don't want backed up every time I rename, move or convert a file, I hit the "Backup Now" option in TM every so often when I finish a project and have moved it from the 60GB drive over to my external RAID. Seems to work just fine and my Mini TM backup stays relatively the same size. It keeps me from having multiple copies of large files backed up and wasting time/space.

When you say TM deletes the oldest backup... wouldn't that be the initial backup? If so, that would mean that at some point the initial oldest backup would be deleted and a new complete backup would need to be created, no?