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If I have backed up via Time Machine onto an external hard drive, can I then delete folders/files on my mac to free up space as they will be kept on an external hard drive?
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.12
...only if you want to lose them eventually. Time Machine will backup your Mac, hourly, daily, and monthly but when the drive is full it will delete the oldest backups to make way for new backups.
Time Machine backups are not archives, they are copies to restore to your Mac in the event of data loss - or to migrate to another Mac. If you want to store your files get another external drive, or keep it on your Mac.
Read Apple's description of Time Machine here.
...only if you want to lose them eventually. Time Machine will backup your Mac, hourly, daily, and monthly but when the drive is full it will delete the oldest backups to make way for new backups.
Time Machine backups are not archives, they are copies to restore to your Mac in the event of data loss - or to migrate to another Mac. If you want to store your files get another external drive, or keep it on your Mac.
Read Apple's description of Time Machine here.
Time Machine is NOT an Archiver. if you delete items off the primary source drives, they will eventually be removed from the backups as well.
Time Machine can not get you around the issue of not enough storage attached to hold all your stuff. Only adding additional and/or larger drives can do that.
Thank you.
My external hard drive actually just said it had run out of space though, so couldn't be deleting the files to free up more space?
If I have backed up via Time Machine, can I then delete folders on my mac to free up space as they will be kept on an external hard drive?
