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merryground

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 26, 2013
1
0
I have a question about the app Time Machine. Does it sync my internal hard disk with the external one? So does that mean that when I delete my backed up files on my internal disk, that with the next sync the files will be deleted on my external hard disk as well? My computer is getting full, and I want to delete the files on my internal disk...
 

bristleworm

macrumors 6502
Jul 22, 2008
295
25
Germany
That's not how Time Machine works. TM creates incremental backups, meaning the first backup it creates is a full copy of your internal drive. After that, only changes are copied to the external drive.
This means that files you delete on your internal drive will stay on your TM backup drive.
However: Once the backup drive is full, TM deletes the oldest backup on it to make space for new ones.
So if you want to keep those files forever you should move them to another external drive or cloud storage.
 

benwiggy

macrumors 68020
Jun 15, 2012
2,473
289
My computer is getting full, and I want to delete the files on my internal disk...
The purpose of a backup is: redundancy. If one hard drive fails, you have a copy on the other one.
If you delete your files from your internal and only have them on the Time Machine drive: what will you do if the TM drive fails?

Depending on your model of Mac, it may be easy to replace the hard drive with a larger one. If that's not possible, then you will need to store some data on an external drive -- and have a backup of that data on a DIFFERENT, external drive.
 
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