thank you all. it's making sense to me now.
the references in TM to a "file" (the actual data, say an mp3) are more like aliases, and so deleting them when space is needed is pretty worthless, so of course TM would need to delete the actual file to gain any space. I might have lots of aliases to a particular file within TM, but only one that contains the actual data.
next question: how does one create a "hard link"? I take it that is more than an alias.
thanks again!
