novice - help please? BASIC ?'s about how retrospect works?

[questions]

Wow, there's a lot of info on this site. I thought I had a pretty simple question. Basically, to try and be brief - I am going to have a visiting group using my machine for a few weeks, so someone advised me to make sure I didn't have sensitive info on it. I generally keep track of a lot of my finances using the machine, but ususally I do that on a disk and don't store too much on the hard drive.

 

Well, after learning that throwing things away on a MAC os 9x and emptying the trash is not really secure (told you I'm a novice), I was told to use a "shredding" software to make sure the few financial docs I had pitched were truly gone.

 

So I did so a day or two later, but then it occurred to me that my machine gets backed up by retrospect through the system I'm connected to through work. Does this mean that the docs I threw away and "emptied" are still retrievable on a backup copy somewhere, even though I have since "shredded" the free space on my hard drive? In other words, does retrospect copy "trashed" and "emptied" data too? or just "normal" saved files?

 

Finally, any idea of how instantaneous the backup is? If I worked on my budgets and bills for an hour, ejected the disk and threw any extra files away, would they likely have been copied while I was working, or is Retrospect more of a "one copy in the middle of the night" kind of program? Any help about these broad questions would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

[natew]

Hi

 

If the files have been backed up it means that they are recoverable from the backup. In other words, yes, your files may still be on a disk or tape somewhere even though you deleted them from your hard drive.

 

Usually people set Retrospect to run a backup once a night. Sometimes less. Chances are anything you shred during the day will not be in the backup.

 

Thanks

Nate