External Hard drives archive/backup duration

If I backup an external hard drive on the first of January, and then back the machine up [1000 times] WITHOUT that drive till December, am I going to have the external hard drive backup in my time machine or the many backups will discard it so that I won't have it in December?

From [Apple's site|http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html]:
*Timing is everything.*
Every hour, every day, an incremental backup of your Mac is made automatically as long as your backup drive is attached to your Mac. Time Machine saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month.
*Backing up to a full disk.*
One day, no matter how large your backup drive is, it will run out of space. And Time Machine has an action plan. It alerts you that it will start deleting previous backups, oldest first. Before it deletes any backup, Time Machine copies files that might be needed to fully restore your disk for every remaining backup.
So, it depends on the size of your backup disk and what changes are made on the drives that are being backed up by the incremental backups. I mean, 1000 backups may not necessarily take a lot of space. But, once there's no more space, the first backups to go will be the earlier ones; thus likely the one of your external drive.
/p

Similar Messages

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    <Post Relocated by Moderator>

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  • Using an external hard drive for backup

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