When I first started using Time Machine, it showed backups for 15 days or maybe even a full month. Somewhere along the way it has changed to only showing 5 days of backups. I can not find an option for choosing how many days to back up. Is there one? How can I get back to longer periods of backups.

I remember once that TechTool Pro told me the disk I was using was close to full. I turned that option of notifying me off because I thought Time Machine would just start dropping the oldest days and recording the newest days automatically.



I've turned TM off right now as you can see in the pict.






A larger view of screen shot is here.

I've seen this happen before more than once. It happened to me when I made a hard drive swap. Installed a new drive and cloned back to the new drive. The actual backups are still on the drive, just not available through the Time Machine interface. TM started a new backup in my case.

I never did bother to figure it out. I just wiped the TM drive and let it start fresh. Have you replaced the boot drive or anything recently? Has it shown only 5 days for a while or is it a new development?

Am I missing something ?
I too thought TM would only back up new or changed files , not make 10 copies of the same file ? Is that whats happening

Looking at my TM picture above, that is what it looks like. All the data are there way back maybe a month, but only a week shows up. I had turned of TM and was about to wipe the external drive TM is on and start over. I thought maybe I should ask before doing that as maybe I would screw up things.
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So, now I've started on the drive Zero Out Data selected; Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

I've had some success by simply deselecting the backup volume and then re-selecting it in the TM pref panel.

As I understand it, Carp, I could have a file called "Ethel's Vacation Plans" and it gets backed up every day for say 30 days if that is what I have room for on my TM backup drive. But, so does everything else on my computer unless I exclude it in the prefs. I haven't excluded anything except another hard drive I use occasionally and that I do exclude.

So I have 30 copies of Ethel's Vacation Plans and I could get the original one back or the one I revised 3 days ago.

I use TM but damned if I could find much information about using it. I've looked everywhere and even Apple's docs don't really give you much information.

Maybe someone will come along and give you better info.

I just know I was glad I had TM when I deleted all the email on my Comcast account! Phew!

Tooooooooooooo late! I'm already erasing the drive. Wish I could have tried that one. If it happens again, I'll keep that in mind. Thanks for chiming in.

My oldest backup is August 23rd. I know that TM is only backing up changes since then since it is only backing up a few MBs at a time. However, if I get info on the latest backup, it shows it as 63 GBs which indicates that it is referencing the original/oldest backup.

I think that makes sense. Let me ask this: If I started my document Ethel's Vacation 30 days ago and made revisions every day for the next 30 days, would I have the document 30 times so that I could just get say the document with the fifth day's revisions on it and not the next 25 days?

I think that's the plan. I don't know if TM backs up the entire document, but it does keep track of all changes to the original. Yes, you can get the fifth day version.