Time Machine backups disapeared

Yesterday, I recovered a file from time machine, from January 2013. Today, when I entered Time machine again, all of the backups prior to March 2014 have vanished (or at least are not visible). My backup disk is not full, 350GB remaining of 1TB. Any advice on how to find the missing data?

Go to time machine preferences and on the window that appears look at the date of the oldest backup. If it says March 2014 then we can assume time machine has deleted old backups to make space for a new one. It should notify you before doing this.
Time machine is not to be thought of as a permanent archive of your old or deleted files. It is designed primarily to enable a restore of recent data in the event of accidental deletion/corruption or change and a source to restore your computer files/preferences in the event of corruption or loss where a clean install of the OS is all you have. Eg a new replacement laptop or corruption of your existing Mac HD.
Carbon Copy Cloner on the other hand will provide you with a bootable clone of your computer, only clones changes after initial backup and archives old versions of files.
Unfortunately it doesn't have the cool interface of Time machine.;D

Thanks Rod. Yes, the oldest backup is March 2014, but that means dozens of backups were deleted, without notification. Plus, the backup hard drive was not close to full.
Oh, well, I must be more diligent in keeping full copies of important files in future.

Thanks again.

JoeCon said:

Thanks Rod. Yes, the oldest backup is March 2014, but that means dozens of backups were deleted, without notification. Plus, the backup hard drive was not close to full.
Oh, well, I must be more diligent in keeping full copies of important files in future.

Thanks again.

Click to expand...

It may have been too full for a complete backup. What you see vacant is whats left after a full backup. What I do is use a single 1Tb external HD partitioned into two 500Gb partitions. I use one for TM and one for CCC. That way I have a bootable external USB HD and incremental TM backups in case I need to go back to a previous version of a file or heaven forbid I accidentally delete something I wanted. It can happen.

Thanks, good advice. I'll set it up as you suggest.