Time Machine Question

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I just set up my Time Machine back up on a Seagate HD and the save went as expected. All 56GB from my HD was copied to this external HD.

But when I open TM from the icon in the Dock it opens with all the neat spacey time warp animation but hidden behind a window labeled DESKTOP
When I attempt to close it to get to the TM it closes TM with it.

Here's a screen capture of what I'm trying to describe
4f5e4d62.jpg


What is this screen, why is it there and how can I get rid of so I can get to TM?

Thanks

Tom
 
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Not sure I understand your question ..... but you are in TM
I assume you were positioned in the finder on the desktop and when you then launch TM, you will find yourself on the desktop in TM as well.
You can navigate in the finder inside TM
Select the backup you want from the right hand side of the screen, at the bottom, because you only have a limited set of backups so far.

Cheers ... McBie
 
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TomServo
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Not sure I understand your question ..... but you are in TM
I assume you were positioned in the finder on the desktop and when you then launch TM, you will find yourself on the desktop in TM as well.
You can navigate in the finder inside TM
Select the backup you want from the right hand side of the screen, at the bottom, because you only have a limited set of backups so far.

Cheers ... McBie

Ahh that makes sense as I only have one instance of a back up. None of the on line tutorials I have seen show that window which is what caused my confusion.

BTW how frequently should I run back ups?

Tom
 
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If you just turn on Time Machine and let it go, it will do a backup every hour as long as the Mac is turned on and not in sleep mode. I have TM backing up to a 1TB drive. My Mac's HD has 178 GB used, and after a year of backing up with TM, it has used only 389 GB on the 1TB external drive I use for backups. If you are using it on your iMac, there is no reason to not let it back up every hour like it is designed to do.
 
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TomServo
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If you just turn on Time Machine and let it go, it will do a backup every hour as long as the Mac is turned on and not in sleep mode. I have TM backing up to a 1TB drive. My Mac's HD has 178 GB used, and after a year of backing up with TM, it has used only 389 GB on the 1TB external drive I use for backups. If you are using it on your iMac, there is no reason to not let it back up every hour like it is designed to do.

Thanks for response, I'll let the software do it's thing.

Cheers

Tom
 
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To add to what has already been said you can also force an immediate backup by either going to the Time Machine icon in the top right menu or right-click the Time Machine icon in the Dock and select back up now.

This is good to do right before you do software updates or Mac OS updates in case you need to restore from a bad update. Depending on what your doing a lot can change within an hour so knowing how to force a backup is good to know.
 
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How much space should be devoted, generally speaking, with external HDs?

I own a MBP with 320 gig HD, and plan to get a new iMac this summer probably with 500 gig HD (or if the base model goes up to 1TB, I'll do that). I plan to purchase a 2TB ext HD along with the iMac to use as for Time Machine for both my MBP and iMac. How much space should I devote to both?

This means my current MBP is not being backed up.
 

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