Does an external hard drive ALWAYS need to be connected to my mbp with retina display for Time Machine?

Does an external hard drive ALWAYS need to be connected to my mbp (OS 10.10.1) with retina display for Time Machine? Or can it be connected once a week or whenever I want? I used to have an external drive always connected to my previous mbp, but it made moving my mbp around a bit of a hassle with it connected...

When the backup drive is not connected, some of the free space on the internal drive will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of recently deleted files. Local snapshots will protect you from unintended file deletions, but not from a drive failure. You should only go as long between backups as you're willing to lose data. If losing a week's worth of work is acceptable to you, then that backup frequency is OK. Otherwise, it isn't.

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