Time Machine Rules

Thanks for your comment. I performed a full restore, following which, when I entered Time Machine again, the oldest backup accessible was the one I had just used. Earlier ones were still taking up space on my hard drive but could not be accessed via Time Machine.

I've bitten the bullet and erased my hard drived and started Time Machine again.

Thanks again

I have been through the Pondini Current troubleshooting list and have not found anything relevant to my issue.

My backup is on a separate HDD used only for Time Machine.

I am not clear about Time Machine's procedures even having read everything from Pondini that I can find.

When I recently did a full restore using a backup that was about a week old I entered Time Machine after I had finished restoring, just to see what was now there. (Time Machine, being on a separate HDD would not be affected by my full restore). I found that I now had access only to folders stored by Time Machine since my full restore.

I can see that Time Machine might be justified in thinking that I now had no interest in older backups. So, is the absence of old backups part of Time Machine's procedures or is it an error? Could I in some way have caused Time Machine to do this?

What makes me think that it is some error is that the old files have not been deleted, they just are not available for use within Time Machine and they do not appear via Finder but they still occupied 75% of my 1Tb HDD. That was my concern but, as I replied earlier, I have erased the HDD and started afresh.

Thanks for your comments.