Time Machine is a feature of the macOS operating system designed to back up disk drive volumes every hour, writing any changes to a new snapshot that only captures the differences between the previous backup.
In fact, some Apple programs, such as Pages and Numbers, and a host of third-party software, create an additional version every time you save, providing incremental backups of applications much more frequently.
But some readers wonder what happens if they don’t run their Time Machine drives all the time. Apple designed Time Machine to be resilient, so that it doesn’t skip the copy version if one or more of the target volumes is down.
The ideal situation is that the drive you are using is still connected, and therefore backups will still take place if they are enabled. This is especially useful, if not critical, if your Mac is acting as a Time Machine destination.
However, as long as macOS allows you to unmount the Time Machine drive, it might not be connected. Use the Finder to select the drive and choose “ File> Eject Drive Name ” (Command-E), and macOS will tell you if it’s in use or eject it.
You can also shut down your Mac and the drive will unmount properly. It will be safer to turn off or unplug the player after your Mac is completely turned off.
What happens if the copy units are disconnected
In cases where your drive (or drives) are offline, macOS uses local temporary snapshots of Time Machine to store intermediate versions, so you don’t lose your changes during that time either.
Sometimes these can get out of hand for unknown reasons; here are some tips on
Within an hour of remounting the volume, Time Machine on these computers will transfer the locally cached snapshots and delete them afterwards, then restart the periodic hourly backups.
We have already said in other articles that you can have multiple Time Machine destinations connected at the same time or selected so that you can use them and rotate the units as an added safety measure against fire, theft or possible damaged units.
This article was posted by Glenn Fleishman igamesnews USA.
