Time Machine

[Ellen]

Hi! My Documents & Downloads folders reside in iCloud, but so far as I can tell, the underlying documents are all downloaded to my MacBook's hard drive. The optimize storage feature is turned on, but the size of the hard drive far exceeds the size of those folders.

My question is whether Time Machine is backing up those documents; or, to perhaps put this another way, where are the local copies stored?

I started to wonder today when I had to reformat the Time Capsule I am still using (that's another story) and did a new Time Machine backup. The size of the first backup seemed quite a bit smaller than the amount of storage I've used on my hard drive. Unless there's no direct correlation between the two?

Thanks.

 

[Weaselboy]

The documents are on your local drive and also backed up to Time Machine. Since you have so much space available, it might be a good idea to turn off that optimize storage to force it to always keep all your data local on the disk.

TM skips a lot of cache files, so it is normal for the backup size to be a little smaller that the total space used on your disk.

 

[Ellen]

Thank you! Is this also normal - I decided to use a new external hard drive in addition to the Time Capsule, and perhaps to replace it. So I bought the Western Digital G-Drive at the Apple Store and created my first backup. Unlike the Time Capsule which stores the backups as a sparsebundle file, on the G-Drive I can navigate to a backup folder that shows all the backed files, which I can then click on and open individually. Is that supposed to happen?

 

[gilby101]

Thank you! Is this also normal - I decided to use a new external hard drive in addition to the Time Capsule, and perhaps to replace it. So I bought the Western Digital G-Drive at the Apple Store and created my first backup. Unlike the Time Capsule which stores the backups as a sparsebundle file, on the G-Drive I can navigate to a backup folder that shows all the backed files, which I can then click on and open individually. Is that supposed to happen?

Yes, that is exactly how it is supposed to behave.

 

[Ellen]

So that's a big advantage over the Time Capsule where all I can see is the sparsebundle (unless I enter Time Machine and navigate through that interface). If I know where the file I want to restore is located, it's easier just to navigate in the Finder.

 

[gilby101]

If I know where the file I want to restore is located, it's easier just to navigate in the Finder.

I agree. I seldom use the flashy TM interface for file recovery.

You can do the same with your Time Capsule. Can get a bit messy, but the extra step is too mount the sparsebundle and it will appear in Finder as a volume and the contents are just like those on the attached HDD. Probably a good idea to disable automatic backups when doing this.

 

[Ellen]

Thanks for the tip.