You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
I have a Seagate external SSD I'm using for my time machine backup. I don't want to keep it connected all the time, so I'll be ejecting and storing it once the full backup is complete and connecting it perhaps once a month or whenever necessary. When I reconnect later on, will it do an incremental backup automatically? Or do I need to do another full backup?
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.6
If you wait a month, it may do another full backup. However, that is based on the legacy TM backups to HFS+ drives.
With an APFS TM backup, the time between backups may not matter. I’m not sure.
The old way used the changes found in the File System Events (FSEvents) database. It doesn’t maintain but a couple of weeks of changes. If they have expired, Time Machine doesn’t know what has changed and will complete a full backup.
If you wait a month, it may do another full backup. However, that is based on the legacy TM backups to HFS+ drives.
With an APFS TM backup, the time between backups may not matter. I’m not sure.
The old way used the changes found in the File System Events (FSEvents) database. It doesn’t maintain but a couple of weeks of changes. If they have expired, Time Machine doesn’t know what has changed and will complete a full backup.
It will do an incremental backup automatically
Automatic Incremental Backups on Time Machine
