I would not count on Time Machine keeping 500 deleted files around forever, out of the goodness of its heart.
External hard drive for macbook air archive#
What you seem to be talking about doing is deleting files from the internal (source) drive, and using the Time Machine backup disk as an archive disk: a disk that would contain the one and only copies (or sets of copies) of each of the 500 deleted photos. If you were using it as a backup for files you had not deleted, you'd have two copies of the latest version of each photo: one on the internal drive, one on the Time Machine backup drive. Yes, I gathered that you were doing something riskier than using Time Machine as a backup for your current files. Maybe there is something better though like you both mentioned, some cloning tool. I could just as easily bypass Time Machine and drag and drop directories to my external HD, but figured Time Machine may be a more efficient way to do it. My question was more around would the 500 on my external drive be deleted given the scenario laid out. I think you can set it up to manually execute or automatically execute, when a external drive is present. I wasn't intending on solely using Time Machine as my backup, I was simply going to use it to facilitate a backup to an external hard drive. I would archive photos to external drives using a clone-type backup tool (or even a Finder copy). So if you want to keep all 1,000 photos, I would NOT delete 500 of them from the internal drive and assume that Time Machine will preserve the other 500 forever for you.
Also, if you start running out of space for backups of current files, it may decide that some of the backups of old files are expendable. You can't count on it recording every older version of a file in the first place. Time Machine is not a version control system, like ClearCase, cvs, or git.
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