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is there a way to preserve daily backups in Time Machine?

My practice using Catalina was to backup daily using Time Machine. These daily backups were never overwritten in Catalina.


But now I'm using Monterey in two new M1 MBPs and just discovered (3 months later! gak) that my daily backups are gone!


Is there any option in Time Machine or do I have to get another backup program?

MacBook Pro Apple Silicon

Posted on Oct 14, 2022 9:47 AM

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8 replies

Oct 14, 2022 10:17 AM in response to kaattie

Time Machine automatically makes hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for all previous months. The oldest backups are deleted when your backup disk is full. The first backup might take a long time, but you can continue using your Mac while a backup is underway. Time Machine backs up only the files that changed since the previous backup, so future backups will be faster. 


There is no way to recover individual daily or hourly backups once they roll into the next "level," eg. hourly into daily, daily into weekly, etc. But, you shouldn't really need to do so either.


Oct 14, 2022 10:36 AM in response to muguy

I got the first M1 MBP in May and started manual backups on a new 5 TB LaCie rugged. I have no backups before August.


Then I got the second machine, identical except 1 TB hard drive. I haven't used or needed to backup the first machine since.


Time Machine in this second machine shows no backups at all before September.


My practice over 15 years using MBP and MBA has been to perform daily manual backups into the same or similar versions of LaCie, and for a couple years, a Passport. I have ALWAYS been able to go to the data I'm looking for on a given date. Always able to copy the data to my machines.


I don't always backup daily. I do a backup when I've made a significant alteration in the data on my machine. Which might be 3, 4 or 5 days a week, or maybe not for 2 weeks if I'm on vacation.


I am floored and flummoxed that I have lost more than 3 months of my hard work!

is there a way to preserve daily backups in Time Machine?

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