Moved house and TM only goes back to move date

Question

We moved out temporarily to restore our home in Nov 09- I have had TM working backing up my Mac Pro to an external drive for a year or so. The MP wasn't used for a while work was going on. I was actually working from another machine, a Book. I disconnected the Drive to access work from my Book. I've now brought the MB to the temp home and will use it there, but now I've connected the drive back to it and ran TM, if I enter, it only goes back to the date I switched off and moved the drive! Does this mean I've lost all previous evidence of back up?
Thx

Answer 1

my splitty is a 1962 wrote:
Just for the future then, when I get to the stage where files have been dormant on my machine and I need to make room, would one usually just erase them from the machine, knowing that the exist on back up
NO. First, that means you only have one copy. When your backup drive fails (and they all do, sooner or later), you risk losing it. Plus, Time Machine will, eventually, delete it's copy of anything that's no longer on your system.
should they be copied onto another drive as filed work/files?
Yes. Or "archived" to CDs/DVDs.
The latter would mean the same files exist in 2 places, seems a bit of a waste of space?
Exactly. The essential part of a good backup strategy is to have (at least) two copies of everything important, in (at least) two places. Three is much better, especially if one is off-site (safe deposit box, workplace, relative's house, etc.). That way, you're also protected against fire, flood, theft, direct lightning strike on your power lines, etc.