An idle trawl through Time Machine tech.
Euan Williams
Time Machine is wonderful software, but how it works can be mysterious, and how to deal with it in a serious crisis could be daunting. As summer fades into cooler evenings here are some references to ease the path to enlightenment. Someone else out there knows the answers to your questions.> http://www.macworld.com/article/132118/2008/02/timemachine1.html <
> http://www.flickr.com/groups/macintosh/discuss/72157603284372963/ <.
In some depth (read right through):
> http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14 < and
> http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Works.html <
which explain Unix hard links, symbolic links, soft links and why these aren't aliases. Note the warning at the bottom of the latter URL.
Apart from Apple's own, revamped, discussion pages,
> http://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=search&product=&q=time%20machine <
there is some Q & A stuff is at superuser.com (see the "related" column),
> http://superuser.com/questions/33503/are-time-machine-backups-incremental-and-is-time-machine-any-better-on-snow-leop <
Enjoy!