My Time Machine backup drive has not been connected for 10+ days and yet when I open T M there are many backups from today, yesterday, etc available. What is going on? Am I right to assume all that backup data will be exported to my external drive when I connect it. Where do these reside? Is there any way to avoid filling up my backup drive with the excessive number of backups.
MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 15.4
You can avoid the automatic creation of local snapshots by changing TM’s back up frequency to “manually”. If set like that then you will have to manually do backups when you connect the b/u drive.
You can inspect and browse the snapshots by using Disk Utility to mount them and show them in the Finder. They reside on the …-Data volume of your startup drive.
You may have to use the View menu in DU to select “Show snapshots”.
Once configured, when a drive is not connected, it will make local snapshots which it will merge into the backup set when the drive is attached.
Time machine backs up without hard drive?
