Time Machine

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Time Machine

An Apple forum post under a heading titled "Create a Time Machine Backup" makes it sound like as soon as I connect an external hard drive, Time Machine creates backups from the past 24 hours, past week, and on into the past. This is unclear to me.

I deleted a Pages file in the past two days. My journal. It was a casualty of a "decluttering" frenzy. Gone. (I have Trash set to empty automatically.) So I want to find the most recent copy in Time Machine, and when I looked up info about Time Machine I saw this tease, that backups are created starting now and going backwards in time.

Does this mean that on a Mac there is some sneaky, magical place where the deleted items are stashed and all of that gets picked up and put back where it was in Time Machine? Please explain.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Sep 23, 2020 10:30 PM

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Answer 1

Sep 23, 2020 11:47 PM in response to lizw466

Two different things:

A Time Machine is a differential backup created every hour, after the initial backup. The initial backup can take hours to happen. After that, the TM software will keep creating differential backups every hour. If a single differential backup takes more than 1 hour, you will have some gaps between "hourly" backups.
When you delete a file, using Finder, the file is usually send to the "Trash". The "Trash" is a hidden directory/folder created for each individual volume. Under normal circumstances, assuming that your file system is not running out of disk space, you have 30 days of files there.

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Time Machine

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