I have backed up my disk using Time Machine.  Now I want to delete the backed-up files from my hard drive.  But when I do and reconnect the external hard drive, the files are also deleted on that.  What do I do?

I have backed up my disk using Time Machine.  I then deleted the back-up files from my MacBook hard drive.
I then reconnected my external hard drive and find the files I deleted from my hard drive are also deleted from
my external hard drive.  Can someone tell my what what happened?  I'm confused.

Hello,
Time Machine is not a good way to do that, when it eventually needs more room it deletes old Backups to make room.
If you really want to keep Files but remove them from the Internal Drive, then I'd get another external drive to copy or clone them to that is not used for TM.

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