Why did Time Machine all of a sudden do a full backup, earsing months of backups to make room on my 1T drive?

Question

The question says it all. I had backups going back for about a year. Then today, seemingly for no reason, Time Machine deiced that it needed to do a full backup. Now the earliest backup is only March of this year. To answer any initial questions, no I've done nothing with or to the computer to warrant a new, 25+ Gig backup, let alone a 300 + gig one.
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

1macprincess! wrote:
What is the benefit to using a cloning tool vs. a backup other than full control. is a backup a mirror image while a clone is an exact copy? should i be cloning my stuff or backup is ok if i needed a full restore for HD failure?
thanks!
Cloning is a mirror image of your boot drive/partition (minus bootcamp partition) which is hold option bootable.
It can be used as a backup as you can just update the clone so it mirrors changes on the boot drive.
Since a clone is bootable, it makes a good option when you need to boot off a dirve other than your boot drive, especially if it fails.
You can most certainly reverse clone while booted from the clone.
So lets say your hard drive fails and Apple replaces it, well if you have a clone you simply clone back onto the new drive.
You should still be making backups of important files regardless, to something else too.
With backups you have the time advantage, you can backup files and date them, then make another backup and date those.
Some people like myself and others rotate a clone every two weeks, just in case we have to go back for something .
With a little management backing up is not problem you just have to leverage what you need and we don't know that at all.