Will Time Machine delete what I delete?

If I delete some old photos to free up space on my laptops hard drive, will Time Machine do the same the next time it's plugged into back up hard drive? Or can I just run the old photos from the back up hard drive? thanks

Just to confirm, Thomas has given you the correct answer. TimeMachine keeps multiple save states (which is of great value) but the only thing you can rely on for certain is that TimeMachine will have the same data your computer currently has.
As each new hourly backup is made there is the possibility that the oldest backup set (or several of the oldest backup sets) will have to be deleted. Also, each day the hourly backups are thinned to create a single day backup and each week the 7 days of backups are thinned out to create a weekly backup. So the file you created a couple days ago (or weeks or months) and deleted yesterday may still be on TimeMachine or it may be gone. It depends on whether TimeMachine needed to delete the backup set that file was on to make a new backup set.

Similar Messages

  • HT201250 I want to use Time Machine to back up my pictures because my hard drive is full but I'm wondering if once I back up the pictures then delete them will time machine delete them off the back up too?

    I want to use Time Machine to back up my pictures because my hard drive is full but I'm wondering if once I back up the pictures then delete them will time machine delete them off the back up too?

    Evetually yes.
    If your pictures have been in the same location (same folder, same subfolder, ...) for more than a week, then copies if them will remain in your TM backups until it fills up. They are then vulnerable to being deleted.
    If they've been there for less than a week, TM could delete them as early as a month from now. If they've been there for only a few hours, chances are TM will delete them tomorrow.
    This is why TM is not the best tool to use to archive data that you will be deleting from your main hard drive. Copy them to a dedicated external drive, or burn DVDs.

  • Will Time Machine delete files on external hard drive?

    I have all my itunes music and videos on my external hard drive. Will Time Machine delete these files. The hard drive is already formatted for mac.

    Note from Time Machine Help files:
    Time Machine works best if you use your backup disk only for Time Machine backups. If you keep files on your backup disk, Time Machine won’t back up those files, and the space available for Time Machine backups will be reduced.
    So it will not overwrite the files but it also will not back them up.

  • Will Time Machine delete files already on my external HD?

    The title pretty much sums it up.  I have a 3TB HD and I use it for saving render files and raw video footage, but now I need to use it for Time Machine too.  If I use it for TM, will all of my files alredy on the HD disappear, or stay put?  One more thing... If I need to partition the external HD and use the new partition for TM, can I still restore my computer from that partition?  Any help will be gladly accepted!

    Yes, that's an OK solution for what you need to do. In fact, if you can partition off just enough space for all the files on your hard drive, then you can just clone to the newly made volume. Much faster than a Time Machine backup.
    To resize the drive do the following:
    1. Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
    After the main menu appears select Disk Utility and click on the Continue button. Select the hard drive's main entry then click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
    2. You should see the graphical sizing window showing the existing partitions. A portion may appear as a blue rectangle representing the used space on a partition.
    3. In the lower right corner of the sizing rectangle for each partition is a resizing gadget. Select it with the mouse and move the bottom of the rectangle upwards until you have reduced the existing partition enough to create the desired new volume's size. The space below the resized partition will appear gray. Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed.  (Note: You can only make a partition smaller in order to create new free space.)
    4. Click on the [+] button below the sizing window to add a new partition in the gray space you freed up. Give the new volume a name, if you wish, then click on the Apply button. Wait until the process has completed.
    You should now have a new volume on the drive.
    Clone Lion using Restore Option of Disk Utility
    Boot to the Recovery HD:
    Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
    Select Disk Utility from the main menu then press the Continue button
    Select the destination volume from the left side list.
    Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.
    Check the box labeled Erase destination.
    Select the destination volume from the left side list and drag it to the Destination entry field.
    Select the source volume from the left side list and drag it to the Source entry field.
    Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.
    Destination means the new external backup volume. Source means the internal startup drive.

  • Will Time Machine delete existing files on hard drive

    A coworker is running OS X 10.6.8 on a MacBook Pro, and the computer is running very slow. I told her she should back up all her files with Time Machine, wipe her drive, upgrade to 10.10 and reimport all her files once that's done and see how things run then.
    The problem is her existing hard drive has a lot of files on it already, that she doesn't want to risk losing.
    So if I back up her hard drive with Time Machine to this hard drive, will it automatically erase all the existing files on the hard drive? Or can the Time Machine back up coexist with those existing files?

    If the drive's already formatted as Mac OS Extended or Xsan, the files will remain as is. If not, they'll be erased.
    In any case, all of the files you want to keep should be on at least two drives so that they won't be lost in the event that one of them fails.
    (116250)

  • Can I use my HD wich i alrady have my documents in it? Will time machine de

    Will time machine delete them?

    Hi, and welcome to the forums.
    Your best bet is to partition the drive, so TM has it's own, exclusive space. As Thomas says, TM is designed to fill all the space available to it, then it will begin deleting the oldest backups to make room for new ones.
    Be aware, though, that TM should have, as a general rule of thumb, 2 - 3 times the space of what it's backing-up, so it can keep a reasonable "depth" of backups for you.
    He's also right about backing-up the other partition. Time Machine will do that, and it's better than no backup at all, but when (not if) the drive fails, you may lose both copies. So it's best to use a separate drive, or back-them up some other way, like to DVDs.
    To partition the drive, see item 6 of the Frequently Asked Questions post at the top of this forum.

  • Due to NAS issues, when I started a new time machine backup it did not have the old backups available. My question is do I need to delete them or will time machine automatically reclaim the space?  Only one Sparse Bundle, same name.

    Due to NAS issues, when I started a new time machine backup it did not have the old backups available. My question is do I need to delete them or will time machine automatically reclaim the space?  There is only one sparse bundle but when I enter time machine I don't see my historic backups.  I use a synology DS212 for my time machine.  Started a new backup which is 218gb but it says 618 gb is occupied  therefore it looks like 2 or 3 backups are still on the disk. Before my NAS issues the last backup was in 2014.  As you can see there is a second sparse bundle from 2012.  Not sure what that is.

    This is an old message now, but what happened to me similarly was:
    I had a major computer crash and through complicated pathways ended up reinstalling (Mavericks) as a new user (long story).
    At least I had good Time Machine backups on an NAS drive (Synology DS212j), or so I thought - when I started Time Machine up again, the old backup file was gone, replaced by a new one using my "new computer" name. The old file was gone both by directly mounting the NAS drive and by clicking "Enter Time Machine".
    It's like I had {OldShareName}.sparsebundle and then it was replaced by {NewShareName}.sparsebundle, all of the old info vanished.
    (I have spent a week finding old files elsewhere and have completed a satisfactory self-restore. It pays to "archive" [my own variation of] as well as "back-up".)
    My belief is that if this were a wired-netword-drive, e.g. plugged right into my iMac with a USB cable, then the old file would have remained.
    But this is an NAS drive, connected directly to my Airport wireless router, and I don't know the significance of the fact that it stores its Time Machine backups as "sparsebundle" files rather than simply as plain(er) files.
    As usual when things get complicated with computers (not just Apple computers) there was never a warning message. Something like "YOU'RE ABOUT TO DELETE A TIME MACHINE BACK-UP FILE!!!" would have made my life a lot simpler.
    BTW, I did try a "restore from Time Machine" option the first thing I had my "new computer" (old hardware, 2009 iMac) up and running, using Migration Assistant, and it ran for many hours and then failed in the wee hours - what that has to do with anything I'm not sure.
    I'm not sure that I have a question about this other than "why do these things happen to me?", but it's a warning. Apart from that I've been very happy with the stability and reliability (but not the cost or set-up complexity) of NAS vs. directly-cabled external drives.
    Charles

  • How does Time Machine decide what to delete when its disk gets full?

    Time Machine deletes the "oldest" backups when it needs more room for a new backup. But exactly what does that mean? Does it delete the oldest backups for the disk being backed up? Or does it delete the oldest backups across all source disks?
    For example, if I back up N Macs to a single drive until it is nearly full, what happens when I add the N+1th Mac and start backing it up? Will it remove some existing files to make room for the new disk's backup, or will it just say "no more room"?
    The answer to this question will affect my choice of backup disks to purchase.

    If you're backing up multiple Macs to a TM backup Volume then if the TM Volume's free space becomes exhausted and TM cannot find room for the current backup it will start trying to delete the oldest backup snapshots associated with the Mac being backed up. It will not touch backup snapshots for the other Macs.
    After 37 days all TM snapshots will be weekly snapshots (with a Sunday date). So if you've been running TM for 37 days or longer there will be one or more weekly snapshots. TM will start with the oldest weekly snapshot and start trimming away to make more disk space available.
    TM is supposed to alert you BEFORE it starts deleting oldest snapshots but at this time it will perform these deletes silently and as much as it can and then only if there's insufficient space will it tell you it has deleted old snapshots but there's still insufficient space for the backup

  • Doesn't Time Machine delete old backups when it needs more space?

    I've had time machine running for a long time now. It worked flawlessly for quite some time.
    Today it gave me the error that there was not enough free space on the disk to complete the backup (the error message says something like there is 360 GB of data on the Time Machine drive already, 140 GB of free space and it would require more than that to complete my backup). I have a 500 GB Time Machine disk and my Mac has a 500 GB hard drive, so I should technically never run out of space.
    The Time Machine almost acts like this is the first time I've ever backed up, which is not true. Shouldn't Time Machine delete old backups to make space for the new? What's even weirder is that if I open the "Star Wars" window of Time Machine I only see one backup from March 31, 2011, but I have been running Time Machine for well over a year now. I'm totally confused as to what happened. Any advice on how to get my Time Machine back up and running (without buying a new drive) would help!

    You see only one backup in the Time Machine window because Time Machine has deleted the older backups to make space to do the current backup.
    Time machine needs some working space to do its backups, and so backing up a 500GB drive onto a 500GB time machine volume is not ideal.
    However, I do essentially the same thing, and what I do, when I have this problem, is exclude things from the backup.
    First off, figure out what you changed. If you moved things from one partition to another, then that will cause a backup of the size of the thing that was moved. This may be why you have a large backup.
    When I have this problem, I exclude large things that have changed recently from the backup. This makes the backup smaller, and means that there is less working space needed. I do this until I get a successful backup. Then I remove things, one by one, from the exclusion list, and back up after each one.
    So, for instance if you just put 4 new folders on your drive, each of which s 20GB of data and they are named A, B, C and D, add all four to the exclusion list, do a backup, then remove A from the exclusion list (leaving B, C & D on it) and do a backup, and continue like this, adding 20GB of backup data each time until none of the new data is on the exclusion list and you get a completed backup.
    Another possible issue, if you use multiple partitions, is that Time Machine may be keeping an obsolete backup of a partition that you previously reformatted. To see if this is the case, go into time machine (The universe interface) and go back to the most recent backup it shows. Click on your computer and see what partitions show up-- are any of them old ones that have been reformatted and renamed? You may be storing a duplicate backup because Time Machine does not realize that the disk that went away isn't coming back (because it has been reformatted as a different partition)
    You can right-click on these items and remove them from your backup by sleecting "Delete all backups of...." This will free up space as well.

  • Time Machine deleted "expired" backups. Why?

    I want to know why Time Machine deleted some backups although the disk has plenty of free space available.
    02/05/15 09:46:39,191 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Starting automatic backup
    02/05/15 09:46:39,281 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Backing up to /dev/disk2s2: /Volumes/Backup2/Backups.backupdb
    02/05/15 09:46:42,900 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Will copy (429,3 MB) from SSD Boot
    02/05/15 09:46:42,968 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Will copy (1,45 GB) from USERS1
    02/05/15 09:46:42,969 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Found 1675 files (2,19 GB) needing backup
    02/05/15 09:46:42,980 com.apple.backupd[91015]: 8,51 GB required (including padding), 1,49 TB available
    02/05/15 09:47:21,437 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Copied 1665 items (440,8 MB) from volume SSD Boot. Linked 1991.
    02/05/15 09:50:03,429 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Copied 85 items (1,75 GB) from volume USERS1. Linked 2582.
    02/05/15 09:50:11,048 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Created new backup: 2015-05-02-095010
    02/05/15 09:50:11,753 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Starting post-backup thinning
    02/05/15 09:50:20,156 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Deleted /Volumes/Backup2/Backups.backupdb/iMac van Hans/2015-04-30-230300 (855,9 MB)
    02/05/15 09:50:22,363 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Deleted /Volumes/Backup2/Backups.backupdb/iMac van Hans/2015-04-30-215910 (308,4 MB)
    02/05/15 09:50:24,766 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Deleted /Volumes/Backup2/Backups.backupdb/iMac van Hans/2015-04-30-205523 (38,2 MB)
    02/05/15 09:50:25,756 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Deleted /Volumes/Backup2/Backups.backupdb/iMac van Hans/2015-04-30-195405 (36,8 MB)
    02/05/15 09:50:27,671 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Deleted /Volumes/Backup2/Backups.backupdb/iMac van Hans/2015-04-30-185319 (36,6 MB)
    02/05/15 09:50:27,672 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Post-backup thinning complete: 5 expired backups removed
    02/05/15 09:50:27,709 com.apple.backupd[91015]: Backup completed successfully.
    Backups are alright so it is not an important issue but I am wondering if something in my preferences set is wrong.
    Hans

    Time Machine keeps hourly backups for one day, then daily backups for a week, etc. What you are seeing is it deleting the daily backups form more than 24 hours ago. This is what it does, nothing to worry about.
    C.

  • Time Machine deleted old backups as disk filled up. Now I'm confused

    Hi guys,
         My backup disk was full, and hence Time Machine deleted my old backup. The most important data on my Mac (for me) is my iPhoto library. As I know it, Time Machine deletes backups for files which are used less frequently. In my iPhoto library, there are some photos which I haven't opened for years. So has Time Machine deleted them?
    Thank you

    As I know it, Time Machine deletes backups for files which are used less frequently. In my iPhoto library, there are some photos which I haven't opened for years. So has Time Machine deleted them?
    Time Machine won't delete files that are still on your Mac, regardless of how long since you view them.
    What it trashes are files that have been removed from your Mac. So, it's not an archive app. For instance, if you backed up with TM and then deleted the pics from iPhoto on your Mac (to save space or whatever) then eventually they will be deleted from TM.
    Regards
    TD

  • Recovering files time machine deleted

    Is there a way to recover files from a back up that time machine deleted? I was in the middle of recovering files then the computer just hanged so I had to force shutdown. When I booted up again, I can't find any of my documents in ALL of the time machine backups previously created.
    Please help. Thanks

    You might be able to use SubrosaSoft FileSalvage to recover the files. You can run it in demo mode first to see what files, if any, it will be able to recover from the disk. With the restricted privileges of the TM disk I'm not sure if it will work but worth a try.
    Sometimes it might be best to not force quit but let it run for what may seem a extraordinarily long time. Were you about to use any other application during that time? If it happens again run Activity Monitor to see what's taking up the computer's effort. It just might be chugging along and not actually hung. TM is CPU heavy.

  • Time Machine deletes oldest backups?!

    So I'm starting to use Time Machine, now that my tape drive went south. I decided to rotate drives and use Time Machine.
    I'm reading threads about rotating drives and it seems straight forward. Swap drive, tell Time Machine to use the drive that you swapped in.
    Two questions:
    1. Does Time Machine know that the 2nd and subsequent backups are incremental?
    2. Is there a way to set Time Machine to ask *BEFORE* it starts deleting files?
    Time Machine is cool. No doubt. What's not cool is how we have to jump through hoops to get decent backups, with very little "best practice" guidance from Apple.
    I want to swap drives and hot have to poke through System Preferences > Time Machine each time I do.
    I don't want to worry about being told *AFTER* the fact that Time Machine "deleted files to make space" which is absurd.
    System Preferences > Time Machine > Options > [x] Notify after old backups are deleted
    It's unacceptable that Time Machine does not warn *BEFORE* deleting oldest backups. That's a decision only the user should make.
    Don

    don montalvo wrote:
    If you swap drives, Time Machine SHOULD be intelligent enough to know where to begin (based on what's on the drive). But it's not.
    Yes, it is.  A new drive will, of course, get a new full backup.  Thereafter, if you swap drives, Time Machine will back up the changes made since the last backup to that particular drive, independent of any others.
    If you swap, say, once a week, the first backup after the swap will be relatively long, of course, as there's a lot to "catch up."  Time Machine might even have to do a "deep traversal," comparing everything on your system to the backups, which takes a while, too, but it will catch up.
    So the issue of data being deleted automatically (where users are only told AFTER data is deleted) is still unresolved.
    And it will remain the way it is; Apple clearly changed it because the downside to having backups fail was much larger than the after-the-fact notification.  There were many, many threads in the Leopard forums where folks didn't understand or didn't heed the messages, and ended up with outdated backups when their HDs failed or were hopelessly corrupted. 
    And the issue of swapping drives being quite tedious is STILL an issue.
    Yes, and there's no indication that will be changed, either.  Apple seems to want to keep things as simple as possible.  There are some workarounds, none entirely successful.  Here's one: http://www.gearz.de/howto/OSX5/changeTMvol-sh-X6
    can't wait for Lion to be released so we can see if things got any better.
    There's no indication of anything like the things you're looking for in any of the published documents or even the rumor sites.  That's all I can say. 
    While Time Machine has some elements of a traditional "Archive" type backup app, it just basically isn't one.  Never has been, never will be.  The main audience is the novice to casual user, or even the power user, who either won't, or doesn't want to, manage backups.  
    If you really want an traditional archive type system, get one.  You can't make Time Machine into one.
    See Kappy's post on Basic Backup for links to a number of various types.

  • Help! Time Machine Deleted My Oldest Backup!

    So, time machine deleted my oldest backup (because it ran out of room)
    I know it's supposed to do this -- but I didn't want it to.
    On my oldest backup, I had a folder with lots of pictures and documents. Does time machine delete files that can't be found anywhere else?
    I don't know what to do! Those pictures meant a lot to me!

    Time Machine isn't meant to be used as an archiving utility, as you've now noticed.
    If a file isn't on your internal hard drive, eventually TM will delete the copy in its backups.
    If you wanted an archiving utility, you needed to look elsewhere
    You may be able to use a data recovery software to get the files back--I suggest you turn off TM until you get this sorted.
    Take a look at Data Rescue II here:
    http://www.prosofteng.com/
    ~Lyssa

  • Time Machine deletes all but latest two backups

    Hello,
    Today I was backing up my macbook, with about 38 GB of space left on my harddrive, and Time Machine deletes everything but the latest two backups (from Feb 2012 to May 2012).... I had things on there from 2009. TM preferences now says I have 27 GB of free space, after the latest backup. I didn't have anything big enough on my computer to be backed up that justified deleting years of data, over 200 GB, in order to compensate for the new data that had to be backed up. Is there any way to recover the files that were erased off of my external hard-drive that were deleted during Time Machine's semi-routine back up?
    Thank you

    Sebastian Kuhn wrote:
    Is there no way to set up Time Machine such that it will ASK before destroying a (potentially valuable) "old" backup
    That's how it worked at first, on Leopard.  But many users either didn't understand it, or never got around to doing anything, so had no backups at all when disaster struck.  It was fairly common, so Apple changed it with Snow Leopard.
    Why does Apple assume that it is always the OLDEST backup (which will be hardest to retrieve) that people would be willing to loose?
    That's usually correct.  Time Machine is not a traditional archive-type app;  if you need archives, make archives.
    If you frequently need things from your backups, you may have a deeper problem.  But most likely, you just need a larger backup drive. 
    That all applies to the vast majority of users -- they have a single internal HD with less than 1 TB of data, so a 2 TB backup drive is ok, 3 TB large enough for most everybody.
    If that's not enough for your setup, you probably need a different strategy anyway.  You may have some data that changes frequently and should be backed-up hourly by Time Machine, plus something like a large media drive that's best backed-up only once a day or so by a different app, such as one of the "cloning" products. 
    there should be the option to exclude different items when backing up to different disks. Is there?
    No.  Apparently Apple wants to keep it as simple as possible, with  few options that may confuse some folks, so instead of making a decision, they do nothing  (that's not just Time Machine, either).  Remember, most of the folks using Time Machine have never used any backup app at all. 
    Apple's resisted all suggestions (and there have been many) for things like the ability to limit the size or age of backups, reduce the 10-day warning when no backup has been done, etc.  Like it or not, that's Apple's approach to pretty much everything -- streamlined, simple, easy to use.  Very successful for the majority.
    Is there any workaround other than the cumbersome procedure of turning Time Machine off, and under "options" re-select the correct set of folders to exclude every time I move from one disk to another? Not exactly what I would call a user-friendly interface...
    Best of course, is get a larger disk.  Is your data worth the price of a 2 TB disk? 
    There are some elaborate workarounds involving automatically swapping destinations and exclusions, but they're very "iffy" as they do things that TM (and OSX) don't anticipate so don't react well to.
    Effective with Lion, however, there's a new tmutil command that in theory would allow you to write an AppleScript to set a destination, add or remove exclusions and run a backup.  Many things could go wrong, of course, but I know of no way to detect which destination is available. 
    Much safer, easier, and more reliable to get a larger drive (or better strategy).

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