Time Machine...?

[kalopsia]

If Time Machine has backed up a file on an external drive, and you delete it (from the desktop) to free up space, will Time Machine delete the file from the external drive on the next back-up?

If so, is there any way to use Time Machine/the external drive to store large files that are slowing down my computer?

Sounds kind of silly, I know, but I'm not very familiar with Time Machine and I don't really trust it.

 

[louishen]

Time machine will do incremental back-ups, do it will not strat deleting any sessions until it runs out of free space on the disk, then the oldest duplicates will be deleted first

so if you still have room on the drive all versions of your files are kept

 

[McBie]

I would say you can trust Time Machine .... it is doing a great job in the background. It has saved me from disaster already a couple of times, not just when files were deleted, but also to recover a previous version of a file.

If you delete a file from your Mac, Time Machine will not delete the file on his backup, so you're safe. ( Although you can actually remove files from Time Machine backups if you want to )

You can store files next to Time Machine backups on the same volume, but it is not recommended.
If you would like to do that, a good way forward is to partition your external disk in 2 partitions, 1 for Time Machine and 1 for other storage requirements.

One word of advice on Time Machine is that sometimes you need to be patient when it takes backups..... it sometimes looks like it is " preparing " forever, ... but don't panic.
The support site on Apple.com has some articles on this.

Enjoy Time Machine.

Cheers
McBie

 

[kalopsia]

thanks!

 

[Paul G]

has anyone had a problem with time machine not backing up? I got a message saying " You do not have the appropriate access privileges to save file '.001blablabla' in Folder 'bkupdrive'". Both my bkup drives are formatted for mac only and i bkup to each drive about once a week or two weeks depending on how much work ive done etc! Anyone else had this? When i search my system for the file, i couldnt even find it?!? Not a clue on what to do, cant find anything anywhere! Eventually re-formatting the drives seems to have worked!

 

[Sawday]

If you delete a file from your Mac, Time Machine will not delete the file on his backup, so you're safe.

Cheers
McBie

McBie is wrong. The previous answer was right. Time Machine WILL eventually delete your old files when it gets full.