Backup only single Timemachine backup

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#1

Hi, i have a macbook that is automatically backing up using time machine to my server. The size of this timemachine backup is 250Gb. My google drive storage limit is currently 200gb but i plan to upgrade to 1Tb. Just wanting to confirm, if duplicacy backs up this folder to Gdrive multiple times, will it quickly fill that 1Tb allowance or does the size stay about 250gb (assuming i don’t download any big files onto my laptop)? Hope this question makes sense, i’m just new to duplicacy so not sure if it is incremental or not

Thanks

#2

Don’t backup a backup, especially Time Machine bundle: it will defeat the point of incremental backup: to restore even one file you would need to restore entire bundle; not to mention ensuring consistency will be difficult: you need to make sure that when duplicacy runs the bundle is unmounted.

Instead, run duplicacy on your Mac and backup source data. Duplicacy supports Time Machine exclusions

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#3

Ok thanks, makes sense, I’ll do as suggested. What do you mean by time machine exclusions?

#4

Not everything from your Mac needs to be backed up. Stuff like caches, temp, and other transient files and bundles should not be. Time Machine skips them. If you are using any other backup tool you would need to write and maintain elaborate exclusion patterns to exclude same files and locaitons. Which would be a massive waste of time, because aparelty this information already exists on the system; doing worse version of it makes no sense.

Duplicacy can take advantage of that information, and automatically skip files that Time Machine would also skip. See more here: Honoring com_apple_backup_excludeItem on MacOS

To turn this on, after you initialize a repository you need to run

duplicacy set -exclude-by-attribute=true

If you use WebUI it’s automatically enabled.

#5

Ok thanks, I use Web UI so will start backing up my Mac directly to duplicacy

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#6

Don’t forget to grant Duplicacy Web Full Disk Access, otherwise it won’t be able to backup stuff from sensitive locations.