[marlon1985]

I just bought a external hard drive (WD PASSPORT PRO), my question is about time machine. It is backing up every hour i see 6 or 7 folder that what I call it, it seem to be the same data, Is it taking space in my hard drive or that is just a history of my backup? I hope I explain my situation the right way!!!!!!!!!!
thanks for your help

[zarmanto]

I noticed the same thing when i first started using Time Machine, but I figure that Apple must be using something along the lines of intentional cross-linking of files. Normally, cross-linking is caused by data corruption, but in this case, Apple appears to be using it to link to the same file from multiple backup folders, creating the illusion that there are multiple copies of virtually everything on your harddrive.

To give you some numbers from my own drive... I have a 750GB Western Digital MyBook, and the data that I'm backing up takes about 275GB. With those numbers, I would get two full backups and run out of space during the third backup if all of the files on the drive were being backed up every single time... but when I look at the data on the MyBook, I see fourty-nine backup "snap-shots", with hourly snapshots going back the past twenty-four hours and daily snapshots going back to the first of this month.

So whatever Apple's doing seems to work pretty well; I wouldn't fret about it too much.

[marlon1985]

thanks for your help.... :-)