I just bought an external hard drive and started using it with Time Machine. However, I have noticed that my Mac's storage now has a "Backups" section of more than 90 GB's. I thought it would just be on the external hard drive. Am I doing something wrong?
MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)
Has the external drive been disconnected for any period of time from the MBP?
If Time Machine is not able to access the disk drive it is configured to send the backups to, it will then create snapshots until access to the disk drive is restored. for more details seeAbout Time Machine local snapshots - Apple Support
Please read this link so that you will understand what those backups mean:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015
Note that they will fall off of space is needed for other data.
Ciao.
This may be a dumb question, but would it make sense to only turn Time Machine on when I want to back up with the external hard drive and have it off when I am not manually backing it up so it does not constantly back up my computer?
Not really. If you are going to defeat Time Machine like that, maybe you should consider using other software instead.
Hooks1016 wrote:
This may be a dumb question, but would it make sense to only turn Time Machine on when I want to back up with the external hard drive and have it off when I am not manually backing it up so it does not constantly back up my computer?
Allan Eckert and I differ here because I do that all the time. 😁
What you should consider is how current do you want your backups to be. Is it worth losing an hours worth of work, a days worth or a weeks worth? Keeping Time Machine connected is painless to the user. Experiment and keep Time machine connected for a month and then decide what is best for you.
Ciao.
Backup Problems
