External HD problems

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I am not sure if this should be posted here or in the "back up" sticky

I have an iMac with Leopard

I am unable to find where my back files are located or even if they backed up correctly .

I may have messed up the installation. I miss the part where I was supposed to go to Disk Utilities and choose "1 partition" . Do I need to do that? It looks like it will erase everything I backed up and I will need to start over . That is fine if that is what I should do.
I always saw the spinning arrow on the menu bar so I thought it was backing up . Now I am not so sure

I can only do manual backups by plugging it in, backing up and ejecting it. If I have it on scheduled backup the computer freezes and I can't even force quit it if there is any activity including in coming mail during the back up

I went to Applications and clicked on the Time Machine app to see if that is where my files were stored and my desk top slid down and was replaced with an outer space scene. The one application window I had open multiplied into a stack of them piled one on top of the other. I saw cancel and clicked that to get out to there .

I just found the External HD Sticky and it said I should have a Time Machine Preference but I don't have that either.

My External HD is showing up in disk utilities

I bought a G|Drive Mini at the Apple store and they said it was formated for OSX so I didn't reformat it

Thanks in advance for any advise you can provide. !
Barbara
 
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I went to Applications and clicked on the Time Machine app to see if that is where my files were stored and my desk top slid down and was replaced with an outer space scene. The one application window I had open multiplied into a stack of them piled one on top of the other. I saw cancel and clicked that to get out to there .

Barbara

Hi Barbara Jay,

The spinning arrow you saw was the Time Machine (TM) icon showing that a back up was in process. If you plug an external HD in and enable TM to work with that drive then it will perform it's first back up, which can take hours depending on how much stuff you have.

After that process it will only do incremental back ups every hour, and they can take less than a minute depending on what has changed since the last one.

The outer space scene is actually the TM desktop and always opens up by presenting you with your current file and folder situation, it tends to default to the Finder view for me.

You can locate previous versions of the file that you are working with by using the dates over to the right and once you've located it, click 'Restore' and it will be that version of the file that you will next open.

If you click on the TM icon it will give you the option 'Open Time Machine preferences..'
 
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Thank you! I am trying your suggestions one at a time,
I went to System Preference and clicked on the TM icon. This is all I got. I didn't get a TM preference.
I clicked on the "Option" button and all it had was a blank space for " Do not back up"

Time Machine .png
 
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Sorry this image is so large . I am not sure how to make it smaller .
I included the menu bar to show you that I get "System Preferences " not a TM preferences. I have clicked on it and it IS the system preference panel of icons
PS I found the place to decrease the size of an image in the future
 
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Sorry this image is so large . I am not sure how to make it smaller .
I included the menu bar to show you that I get "System Preferences " not a TM preferences. I have clicked on it and it IS the system preference panel of icons
PS I found the place to decrease the size of an image in the future

Yes, that's right..it opens the TM preferences from within System Preferences...you can open the options another way by going System Prefs/System/Time Machine if you want.

Click the question mark in the pane and this will explain a few things by opening the relevant help page.
 

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