I'm curious about the different strategies people have for optimizing their time machine backups. What folders/files do you exclude?
I personally don't exclude anything.
I exclude my VMWare Fusion Windows XP file.. It's so huge that every time I log in to Windows visa VMWare, Time Machine detects it as "modified" and back the whole file up...
You do know they changed that in the last update, right?
I didn't exclude anything until I realized I was filling up my backup drive too fast and only had a few backups on there, then I started excluding my Downloads folder (if I want to keep something, it gets moved somewhere else anyways), my DVD rips folder, and my System Files. Don't need any of those backed up anyways, and now my backups take up a lot less space.
jW
Did they?? How did they change it? Does it not back up the whole file now??
Thats why stuff like caches, temporary files, scratch disks, virtual machines, email storage (as single files) are problematic for storage
I have heard some claim that TM automatically excludes caches. Is this not true?
Wouldn't that mean you would lose everything if your system went down?At the moment I'm using a 60GB LaCie Little Disk so I exclude everything except for my iPhoto library and documents folder. Once I get a big FireWire external then everything gets backed up.
Wouldn't that mean you would lose everything if your system went down?
My experience is that if the system dies completely, when you reformat and re-install, the new system will not access the old TM backup from the previous system. On the other hand if you back up your *system* to the TM drive, then you can point to it during install as a source. I had this exact problem early on anyway, but maybe they have changed it since 10.0.
If you are just backing up your documents and pictures folder, it would make more sense to not use TM at all and just use a regular backup program like SuperDuper! to move changed files to the backup.
Did they?? How did they change it? Does it not back up the whole file now??