Comments on: Good folders to exclude from Time Machine backups

By: zevenzin

zevenzin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:31:25 +0000

Although an interesting concept, a point I did not find in this thread is what type of system you are working with.

In a Macbook Air, I would do the whole thing; on the Mac Pro, I’d exclude the downloads folder, great, etc.

But contrary to popular belief, in which a mac is a mac, no matter what, in reality, not all Mac’s are created equally (and neither are people’s needs).

By: Ryan Block

Ryan Block — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:18:41 +0000

Don, smart call on Dropbox! I’d suggest you do backup your mobile apps folder though, especially if you have any apps that aren’t available for download anymore.

By: Don Wilson

Don Wilson — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 05:24:11 +0000

I excluded my Dropbox folder as well since Dropbox backs that up for me. I also excluded /Users/[user]/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Mobile Applications since those are only there to back up my phone. I don’t feel like I need to backup the backup.

By: Zig

Zig — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:47:40 +0000

Great article. I’ve been trying to do a large backup on a WD Mybook Live NAS. Since it’s 350+ GB it hung every time. Through some fiddling around I’ve found it best to exclude all of these large folders (particularly Music and Photos), then add them back into the backup after the initial backup is complete. Wee-Haw!

By: Tommy

Tommy — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 20:17:46 +0000

Thanks for your list, absolutely great. I was especially interested in removing parallels after the first backup….. But I cant find parallels in /Users/[user]/Library/Parallels instead I can find a 12GB file in Macintosh HD/Programs/Parallels/WinXP…. is this the same file you are talking about ?? Thanks a lot !

By: Micha

Micha — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:02:49 +0000

Thanks for the very useful post, Ryan.
I had a problem with time machine backing up all my encrypted Espionage folders which was insane since those bundles of data would get backed up even if just one tiny file had been altered.

So whoever has the same problem: http://www.taoeffect.com/espionage/EspionageHelp/pages/usg-backup_timemachine.html has an obvious tip (well NOW it’s obvious to me ;).

Have a good one!

By: Semiconducted » Blog Archive » Getting control of Time Machine backups by Damon Hamm

Tue, 10 May 2011 22:07:26 +0000

[...] http://ryanblock.com/2008/05/good-folders-to-exclude-from-time-machine-backups/ [...]

By: Dave Morrison

Dave Morrison — Wed, 04 May 2011 10:32:54 +0000

For those Lotus Notes users among us (and yes there are many), you can exclude your replicated Notes Applications like mail etc which are stored in /Library/Application Support/Lotus Notes Data.

If you have any locally created databases that you want backing up, or any databases that you’ve created private views for, I’d suggest creating two directories inside this so that you can only exclude applications that are already stored on a server. For example.

/Library/Application Support/Lotus Notes Data/local <- do not exclude from TM and keep your own apps here
/Library/Application Support/Lotus Notes Data/replicas <- exclude this from TM and replicate all server based apps into this directory.

Notes is pretty lenient on where it searches for its applications, so you can simple shut down Notes, use Finder to drag/drop the files into new directories and then fire Notes back up again. When you open an application that's moved, it'll hunt through all directories below it's main data folder looking for it, then update the pointers to it.

By: EditFactory

EditFactory — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 07:22:28 +0000

Thanks for the nice list.
For Final Cut Pro Users there are another important set of folders one might want to exclude:
All the Render Folder, i.e.
/Users/[user]/Documents/Final Cut Pro Documents/Render Files/
Users/[user]/Documents/Final Cut Pro Documents/Audio Render Files/
Users/[user]/Documents/Final Cut Pro Documents/Waveform Cache Files/
/Users/[user]/Documents/Color Documents/Render/
/Users/[user]/Documents/DVD Studio Pro Documents/Render/
A simpler solution is to exclude the complete higher level folders:
/Users/[user]/Documents/Final Cut Pro Documents/
/Users/[user]/Documents/DVD Studio Pro Documents/
/Users/[user]/Documents/Color Documents/
/Users/[user]/Documents/Motion Documents/

The really professional solution is of course to relocate (in Final Cut Studio setup) all render and scratch folders to a different designated scratch disk and exclude the whole disk from Time Machine.

By: Joey

Joey — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 02:49:29 +0000

The name of the article is “Good Folders to Exclude From Time Machine Backups,” not “How to Exclude Folders.” An individual’s understanding of how to exclude a folder is pretty implicit given the title. Not only that, but the process of excluding a folder is as simple as hitting the options button and adding a folder through a very intuitive, easy-to-understand interface. I found this the very first time I used Time Machine. Do you complain when the guide for ripping a DVD doesn’t explain where to “find” the DVD you’ve just inserted, or even worse, how to insert the DVD itself? Jesus…

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 15:06:01 +0000

Why write an article about folders to exclude and then not say how to do it? It’s pointless writing an article if you exclude important information.

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:44:06 +0000

if you exclude /System now (10.6) it prompts you about also excluding other installed system apps / unix tools, may be good to do this dir first (rather than last as I did) to save some time.

By: XCool

XCool — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 15:45:16 +0000

I bought a new 500GB drive to perform my Time Machine backups and was looking for an alternative strategy. Previously, I had my 320GB disk full in a matter of weeks backing up my MBP which has an internal 160GB disk.

One thing I don’t like is that I have less space to backup more stuff with. But the advantage of that is that I can now safely go back all the way to 2009 and restore a file. Back to the Future! :)

Anyway, with this new 500GB, I think I’ll just backup my data partition. The other partition stores Mac OS X and Applications – all of which I can actually reinstall without hesitation.

By: Backups mit Time Machine und Backblaze | dreitehabee

Backups mit Time Machine und Backblaze | dreitehabee — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 10:54:47 +0000

[...] Downloads-Ordner oder die Podcasts in der iTunes-Bibliothek, lässt sich trefflich und kompakt bei Ryan Block nachlesen. Sollte es zu Datenverlust auf der primären Festplatte kommen, ist das Backup der Time [...]

By: tomi

tomi — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 21:42:18 +0000

I only want to backup my personal files (work, pictures, documents…) so I selected all (also hidden) files on the HD except /users/user and then also excluded some you kindly suggested from that folder too – like downloads and stuff… I really dont care about apps and system settings, because everything can be reinstalled and reset.

The problem is that still I have a strange feeling about it – but myself cant figure it out what could go wrong with doing it like that.

Do you think I am missing something here?

By: Ryan Block

Ryan Block — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 04:35:34 +0000

Daniel, as far as I know, no. I haven’t seen any 3rd party utilities that facilitate this, either (but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist).

By: Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 19:57:14 +0000

Thanks for the article, very helpful!

Is it possible to set Time Machine to backup only, for example, iTunes and iPhoto?
I wouldn’t want to sacrifice too much space, and I would be very happy with having a safe copy of my growing music collection and photos.

It seems that you can add exclusions only, but not set what it should include?

By: Owen Densmore

Owen Densmore — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 21:37:55 +0000

Useful tool: OmniDiskSweeper. It creates a clickable hierarchy of your file system sizes. I was surprised how large some files were. Using this to setup the excludes list was quite helpful for me.

I do as many here do: use CCC/SuperDuper to create a bootable image, and TM for mainly my docs, code, and other personally created items. I’m switching to TM to either a networked MacMini or Extreme Airport, so small size is important. I do a full disk SD backup whenever I finish a project or similar “checkpoint”.

By: Tejal Gholkar

Tejal Gholkar — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:41:27 +0000

I am a newbie to Mac and have been searching around for the best way to back up data. Tried CCC but found that incremental backups weren’t doing what they were supposed to do (files weren’t getting updated when I knew they shoud..so gave up). Clone of the hard drive via CCC seems to work fine.

So now I have partitioned my external HDD into two. One has a full clone of my MacBook HDD , once a week via CCC. The other partition has TM set up to only back up personal files (from User/User/). For TM, I have excluded everything else i.e. no Library, System and everything that Ryan mentions. That way (I think), I shall have
1.bootable clone of my Mac if the internal HDD fries (this has everything thats on the HDD)
2. TM backups of my personal stuff if I need to restore earlier versions

Hope this helps.. or if you think I am missing something, let me know!

By: Johnny B.

Johnny B. — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 22:04:04 +0000

If you are using virtualbox it’s also clever to back up its harddisks seperately and exclude ~/Library/virtualbox/Harddisks from timemachine.