Time Machine question?

Question

I have a mac book. I have used up all of the space on its hard drive. I bought an external hard drive, a WD My Book to be exact (500GB). My plan was to move all of my files, movies, music, everything else onto the external hard drive and then delete it all off of my computer so I have space for more stuff (documents I would make in the next school year, more video, etc.). So I don't think I'm really "backing up" my hard drive because I'm deleting the original. When I connected it to my computer it asked if i wanted to use it to back up my hard drive using time machine. Now I know absolutely nothing about time machine except for what it said on the Mac website which most of it i didnt understand. Do you think I should use Time Machine or just use it like a normal external hard drive? Also, when I was reading up on it, it mentioned how "It alerts you that it will start deleting previous backups, oldest first. Before it deletes any backup, Time Machine copies files that might be needed to fully restore your disk for every remaining backup. (Moral of the story: The larger the drive, the farther back in time you can back up.)". Could someone please explain this to me? If I put something on it today and then leave it on their for a while while I put more stuff on there, will it be the first thing to be deleted when I fill up the hard drive?

Answer 1

I would recommend using your external hard drive as you originally intended to do.

If you don't know that much about the Time Machine software then I wouldn't mess with it until you learn more about it and what it actually does.

Personally, I'm not that familiar with it as I don't use a Mac.

From what I know about backups, each time you do a backup none of your personal files should be deleted, only new information will be added to the next backup that wasn't backed up from the previous one. All information will be saved from all previous backups to the next one including any new information that wasn't.  

Answer 2

Use it as a second hard drive. Just copy, cut paste or send to it. If you use that program it will always keep your hard drive backed up in case something happens to your computer. I recently bought a 500GB hard drive to keep all of my karaoke music on because my original 250GB was full. I had the same dilemma when I first got it. I guess they assume you need another hard drive to back up not because you need more space. I now have both hard drives installed and I use one for karaoke and one for everything else.