How does Time Machine work?

Could someone explain to me how exactly Time Machine works?

How could it simply save the settings + programs you used to have without taking so much space?

If you deleted the programs, how could it retrieve it? Isnt it DELETED?

Does Macs save some parts of your files?

Difference between Secure Empty Trash Can and Regular Empty Trash Can?

If you use SET, does it mean Time Machine wont save it, and cant retrieve it?

thanks for all the info!

well, its not out yet, so no one knows. from what i have heard, it requires an external hard drive to save data to.

my friend codes for apple and i could tell u a BIT about what he told me what its like
yes you need an external hard drive....the beta is out just so u know.... but thats a secret....ummmm what else may i say about it with out getting people in trouble you choose the files you want to save in time machine then it does it for you ...so it wont save all your files without you wanting it to...i dunno yeah its basically like a back up but with dates lol
what more can i say...

its really in the glitchy stages right now and probably will be till december maybe but who knows.... and ummm yeah if i can say anything more.....
alot of the people who i've talked to about it...think its a useless feature cause its identical to normal backup basically just kinda more included in the os

jaywong87 said:

Could someone explain to me how exactly Time Machine works?

How could it simply save the settings + programs you used to have without taking so much space?

If you deleted the programs, how could it retrieve it? Isnt it DELETED?

Does Macs save some parts of your files?

Difference between Secure Empty Trash Can and Regular Empty Trash Can?

If you use SET, does it mean Time Machine wont save it, and cant retrieve it?

thanks for all the info!

Click to expand...

I assume ti maybe working like auto recovery button on some of the PC laptops where the certain setting and the image of your PC's status is takne so when it is dead you can recover it from there! I dunno....

When you delete things from your harddrive, they're not really deleted, the flags are just removed. The information doesn't get truly deleted until it gets written over.

When the flags are removed, it shows that the disk has erased it and that the drive has that much more space free.

It's how actual hardware works vs. how software shows what's happening. To actually erase a whole drive, you'd have to degauss it or use a formatting utility that writes "nothing" over the entire drive.

Time Machine may be able to bring back files from that information...It's just my speculation.

Village Idiot said:

When you delete things from your harddrive, they're not really deleted, the flags are just removed. The information doesn't get truly deleted until it gets written over.

When the flags are removed, it shows that the disk has erased it and that the drive has that much more space free.

It's how actual hardware works vs. how software shows what's happening. To actually erase a whole drive, you'd have to degauss it or use a formatting utility that writes "nothing" over the entire drive.

Time Machine may be able to bring back files from that information...It's just my speculation.

Click to expand...

This is how I thought Time Machine would work, it doesn't make any sense to require an external harddrive.

What if you were on a laptop on a trip and needed to recover a file but didn't have your hard drive? To me that defeats the whole purpose of time machine.

Time Machine isn't magic. What if you wanted revision #10 of a document which has #25 revisions done to it in total? It's not going to be able to piece that together from scaps of data on the hard drive. It needs to store those document revisions somewhere safe. On an external hard drive, for example.

I think it will also work with your main hard drive as well although that's not much of a back up. If the computer dies, your back ups go with it.