[nvpowerdoc]

Is there a way to perform a backup to retain files within the backup that have since been deleted on the source drive? Essentially, we would like to remove old photos (over 20GB) from the source drive (and iPhoto for that matter) yet retain the original camera to iMac upload time/date stamp. I read in your documentation that files which are deleted on the source drive will be removed from the backup when doing a partial backup (Smart Update).

Reason for question: In the past I had made a simple copy of the photos onto an NTFS drive. Once the files copy, a new time/date stamp appears on each file (based on the day the file was copied). If the photo is moved back into iPhoto, it appears by date in the wrong order of when the photo was actually taken (and / or uploaded). This is important if you want to keep chronological order of the photos.

Should I do a full system backup, then a partial "user" file backup, delete the files on the source drive to free up space, then continuing doing "user" file backups to a new sparseimage?

Perhaps the easiest thing to do is buy a bigger hard drive - just that the machine is an older iMac G4 (my wife's), it works fine for what she does, it's just out of HD space (and I'm a PC guy with knowledge on building PCs not Macs).