How do I confirm the iphoto data is backed up on external drive?

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How do I confirm the iphoto data is backed up on external drive?

I have a mac mini. It is full with mostly pics and videos in iphoto. I bought a 1 TB Seagate external drive and backed up the whole computer via time machine. About 300 MB moved over. Before I delete the valuable pics of the kids - how can I confirm the photos and videos are in fact moved over? I went into the seagate drive, found Backups.backupdb which seems to be a directory of the computer that was backed up. UNder that I see the name of the computer, and things like:

library

desktop pictures

google

graphics...

a whole bunch of stuff. But nothing that looks like photos, pics, iphoto, etc.

What am I missing? "speak" slowly - I'm a PC convert to Mac that is struggling with the Apple way here.

Mac mini, iOS 7.0.4

Posted on Nov 22, 2013 6:25 PM

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Answer 1

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Nov 22, 2013 8:14 PM in response to JesseOakwood

You absolutely must not use Time Machine to store data that you want to keep permanently. It's a backup system, not an archiving system. Anything that you delete from the source disks will eventually be deleted from the backups.

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Answer 2

Nov 22, 2013 9:48 PM in response to JesseOakwood

As Linc mentions TM is not for archiving valuable date.

Also you say you backed up your whole computer to TM, but then follow that with only 300 MB was copied, something is wrong here, your TM backup should be more like Giga-bytes, several if not many Giga-bytes in fact.

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