Why does time machine go back less than a month?

clearly, i'm doing something wrong...
i'm in the process of cleaning up stuff from my external drives.  sometime in the fall, i switched my time machine backup to a larger drive.  i did my best to follow the instructions for transferring over a time machine backup, and it didn't work.  i still have the old TM database, but time machine wouldn't recognize it.  so i lived with it and got on with my life, starting a new TM backup.
today, i just realized that it goes back less than a month.  what is THAT about?  before you ask, it's NOT a disk space issue.  on a 2 TB drive, i currently have 1.23 TB of available space.  there's plenty of ROOM for further backups, but it's just not keeping them.  please help... i love time machine, and it's saved my bacon on a number of different occasions.  but on many of those occasions, i had to go back quite a bit further than 3 weeks to restore what i needed.  if that's all i'm going to get from time machine, it's usefulness to me is slashed by about 80%.

Time Machine automatically deletes older snapshots to make room for new ones. If your backup history is shorter than you expect, it may be because you're backing up one or more large files frequently.
Virtualization software such as VMware, Parallels, or VirtualBox creates a large virtual-disk container that is constantly changing, so it has to be backed up every time Time Machine runs. That will quickly fill up any backup destination.
You should exclude the virtual-disk file(s) from your Time Machine backups. To do that, click the Options button in the  Time Machine preference pane. You may also be able to do it in the virtualization app's settings. Back up the files on the virtual disk from within the guest system, using a native backup application.
A compromise solution is to create a "snapshot" of the virtual machine in the virtualization software (not a Time Machine snapshot.) That will give you a single large file that never changes and only has to be backed up once. All the subsequent changes will be stored in a new file that's initially much smaller, but will grow over time. You should still exclude that file from TM backup. If you ever need to restore the VM from Time Machine, you'll have a working setup, which will make it easy for you to restore the rest of the data from within the guest system.
Another common cause of large TM snapshots is native OS X disk images. If you store a lot of data on one or more writable disk images, they should be in "sparsebundle" format, which will be backed up much more efficiently than any other format. A sparsebundle will not be backed up at all while the image is mounted. Make sure you unmount the image often so it can be backed up. Consider eliminating large read/write disk images from your workflow, if possible.

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    Tell us how you go.
    Someone posted a solution.. See this thread.
    Macbook can't find Time Capsule anymore
    Start from the bottom and work up.. I have a list of good network practice changes but I have avoided Yosemites bug heaven.
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