What folders have you excluded on macOS?

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#1

I’m using Duplicacy, via the GUI, as an alternative to BackBlaze and a backup for my CCC and Time Machine backups, as one the SSD that CCC was backing up to has already died.

So far I’m backing up everything with the back up set to / and some exclusions. However, every week when I back up to my cloud storage folder, several new gigabytes are added. All new files are added to an external drive, which is then backed up to a different service, so I’m not sure why this is. I suspect that it has to do with macOS, as macOS and iOS find ways to quickly eat up space.

Any suggestions on what folders to exclude (without excluding the entire Library folder) would be appreciated. If anyone has any experience with restoring from a backup, any tips regarding that experience would be greatly appreciated as well!

#2
  1. Don’t backup time machine bundle; its not trivial to make it consistency and rather pointless; backup the source data instead. Keep time machine backup for quick local restores.
  2. Don’t backup root because you can’t restore it (readonly filesystem, secure boot, etc). And its wasteful - why would you want to backup macOS and system files even if it was possible?
  3. Only backup non-transient and non-derivative user data. Which is pretty much your home directory with some exclusions. For example, there is no need to backup Safari or firefox web cache, or any other files that are excluded by time machine, such as ~/Library/Caches, and a million of other derivative data. A reasonable starting point for your customizations is described here: Unattended Duplicacy setup on macOS | Trinkets, Odds, and Ends. Note, the duplicacy repository is initialized in your home directory (and duplicacy_web is given full disk access in the security preferences). It’s rather counterproductive to backup system root.
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