You see everyone, this guy actually related to the question and actually answered it. The guy who was asking the question was right to be pre-angry about stupid respondents.
This is the ONLY way to backup information on your hard drive before you delete them off your main internal Mac's hard drive. Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner will likely overwrite your precious files after the external drive gets full. I learned this the hard way. Mac offers no obvious solutions to the main reason for backing up - to move everything off your computer so you have more space. The solution is to drag everything you intend to delete (copy) from your Mac onto the external hard drive, make sure its safe, then delete the files from your main internal hard drive.
Therefore you MUST drag at least your entire USER folder onto an external hard drive every so often. Forget about Time Capsule except for cases of upgrading or losing your computer. Time Machine is not for removing hundreds of Gigabytes of data from your hard drive so you have more space. Calling it a 'backup solution' is shifty in the extreme. DO NOT RELY ON TIME MACHINE. If you have been saving everything with unique file names, you can even overwrite the backed up USER folder on your external drive later and it will only ADD new files and folders. Be careful - Cameras and some programs (Yes I call them 'programs', not 'applications' like a n00b) will start renaming based on counting rather than datetime when there are no files referenced by that number any more. If you know this, make new folders with proper dating and then drag the files you want into those new folders. A folder called 'My Pictures 2013-02-23' might contain IMG_0006.jpg, which is a precious photo of your sister's wedding, whereas a folder called 'My Pictures 2016-08-09' might contain IMG_0006.jpg, which is a blurred picture of your foot from when you dropped the camera.
So be careful, and create new folders with dates on them before dragging files and folders onto your backup hard drive. Otherwise when you delete them from your Mac's hard drive and clear your Trash, you would need some kind of retrieval tool or specialist to get that data back. Given that you don't want to spend $10,000, don't make this mistake. Buy more and more external drives and keep them airtight in plastic in a cool box for future generations.
