[mpancha]

I know in Time Machine you can tell it what not to backup, but instead of telling it to backup everything except _____, is there a way I can tell it to only backup certain things?

Ideally I only want to backup my documents, desktop, music, photos and mail (and mail downloads) directories. Everything else I dont care about backing up. I just want my data, I dont care about the preferences and applications as all software I have I've paid for and have serials to and CDs or download links to. I dont intend to get a 200-500 gb drive just to backup data, my 80 gb drive should be plenty to cover my needs, but its only enough to cover a few days worth of backups so far.

[Person Man]

Originally Posted by mpancha 

I know in Time Machine you can tell it what not to backup, but instead of telling it to backup everything except _____, is there a way I can tell it to only backup certain things?

Ideally I only want to backup my documents, desktop, music, photos and mail (and mail downloads) directories. Everything else I dont care about backing up. I just want my data, I dont care about the preferences and applications as all software I have I've paid for and have serials to and CDs or download links to. I dont intend to get a 200-500 gb drive just to backup data, my 80 gb drive should be plenty to cover my needs, but its only enough to cover a few days worth of backups so far.

Not directly. Maybe future versions will allow it, or allow you to specify that something only gets backed up once a day or once a week, for example, instead of every hour.

For now, you'll have to exclude everything except your user folder. Sure, it will back up your personal Library folder too, but that won't be very big compared to everything else.

[mpancha]

PersonMan >> not the answer I was hoping for, but you confirmed what I thought. I was hoping I wouldnt have to back up my entire library, but compared to the extra 20 GB of software that keep getting backed up, I guess I can't be too picky

[Person Man]

Originally Posted by mpancha 

PersonMan >> not the answer I was hoping for, but you confirmed what I thought. I was hoping I wouldnt have to back up my entire library, but compared to the extra 20 GB of software that keep getting backed up, I guess I can't be too picky

You might want your library backed up, as Safari bookmarks, etc are stored in there...

What I gave you was the easiest solution. What do you have in your Library that takes up so much more space? The way Time Machine works is it backs up things once, and then if they don't change, it just links to the one copy on the drive multiple times.

The Library folder in my user area on my drive at work is ~310 MB, once you exclude the Parallels virtual drive I have in there, which I did. At home my Library is about 900 MB, mostly stuff that doesn't change much.

You could exclude individual folders within Library in addition to everything else, if you want, but the space you'd save doing that would most likely be negligible.

[mpancha]

Well its not really a matter of space with my library, its just that if/when I format its b/c I have tinkered or experimented a bit too much on my mac and want to start with as close to the default settings as possible. The only items I want backed up are my documents, music, photos, iCal, AddressBook, Safari Bookmarks and Mail. iCal and AddressBook I'm not concerned with anymore now that I've started using Plaxo more, it automatically backs up and syncs everything across all my computers and devices.

For now I am going to do as you suggested and exclude everything except my home folder, but do look forward to having the opposite ability of specifying only what I want to backup in the future.

[Person Man]

Originally Posted by mpancha 

Well its not really a matter of space with my library, its just that if/when I format its b/c I have tinkered or experimented a bit too much on my mac and want to start with as close to the default settings as possible. The only items I want backed up are my documents, music, photos, iCal, AddressBook, Safari Bookmarks and Mail. iCal and AddressBook I'm not concerned with anymore now that I've started using Plaxo more, it automatically backs up and syncs everything across all my computers and devices.

For now I am going to do as you suggested and exclude everything except my home folder, but do look forward to having the opposite ability of specifying only what I want to backup in the future.

Well, you could exclude all folders inside your Library folder except Mail and Safari.

[TETENAL]

The idea of Time Machine is to back up everything. Just to be safe there is a backup of everything on your drive. Whatever you want to restore at a later point is another question. But everything is there.

You say you don't want a backup of your Library folder because you might mess with and you don't want to restore the mess. Then just don't restore the mess. But having it backed up can not harm. I give you an example: you might think it's unnecessary to back up preferences, your disk dies and you restore from the backup. All your data is back, but now Software Foo asks for its registration code. What was that? It's forgotten. But it's not a problem, because you can restore just this app's preferences from the backup.
There can be many similar scenarios where you might want to restore something you have not thought about before. If the drive space is not an issue, just back it all up and you're safe.

Now if you have a rather small backup drive, then exclude the system and if that's not enought the Applications folder, since those can always be reinstalled from their discs are be redownloaded.

[cgc]

I see a huge issue with Time Machine and a virtual drive. I have a 20+GB virtual drive I use with VMWare Fusion. If I change what's in it will Time Machine try to backup up the entire 20+GB file? That'd suck.

The point of backups isn't to be able to restore the OS, it's to be able to restore critical files and documents. The OS is restorable from the original DVDs.

[Hal Itosis]

FWIW, we can see a full list of paths and items that Time Machine auto-excludes:

defaults read /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions

Note the last group there labeled "UserPathsExcluded".
In that section... for example, where it says Library/Caches
it means every user's /Users/*/Library/Caches folder.

[Person Man]

Originally Posted by cgc 

I see a huge issue with Time Machine and a virtual drive. I have a 20+GB virtual drive I use with VMWare Fusion. If I change what's in it will Time Machine try to backup up the entire 20+GB file? That'd suck.

The point of backups isn't to be able to restore the OS, it's to be able to restore critical files and documents. The OS is restorable from the original DVDs.

Yes, every time it changes, which can be constantly when you're running the application, the whole 20 GB file gets backed up again. Every hour, and it eats up disk space rapidly. So, for now the solution is to exclude the VM and back it up manually, on your own schedule.

Perhaps in an update Apple will make it possible to tell Time Machine to back up large files that change frequently on a different schedule, like once a week or something. Or eventually Time Machine will be on a ZFS volume and back up on a block level instead of a file level. Imagine backing up only the changed blocks in a large file.

For now, I'm manually backing up my 16 GB Parallels VM once a week. Eventually I'll write an AppleScript that runs every weekend to do it for me.

[mpancha]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

The idea of Time Machine is to back up everything. Just to be safe there is a backup of everything on your drive. Whatever you want to restore at a later point is another question. But everything is there.

You say you don't want a backup of your Library folder because you might mess with and you don't want to restore the mess. Then just don't restore the mess. But having it backed up can not harm. I give you an example: you might think it's unnecessary to back up preferences, your disk dies and you restore from the backup. All your data is back, but now Software Foo asks for its registration code. What was that? It's forgotten. But it's not a problem, because you can restore just this app's preferences from the backup.
There can be many similar scenarios where you might want to restore something you have not thought about before. If the drive space is not an issue, just back it all up and you're safe.

Now if you have a rather small backup drive, then exclude the system and if that's not enought the Applications folder, since those can always be reinstalled from their discs are be redownloaded.

I disagree with the initial point, that its to backup everything. True, as a default, that's what it is set to do. And for most people that's what they want, whether they realize it or not. I on the other hand, just want something to have a constant backup of my data only, I couldn't care less about the apps, prefs, and system files. ECurrently I'm using an 80 GB ext drive, but even if I had a terabyte drive, I'd rather have a lot of versions of my data than fewer versions of everything on the hard drive. Again, my preference as a full backup of my drive is something I would never utilize.

I also get what you mean in your example, but I have my own workflow with serial numbers and always have those stored safely away in their own text file so I can quickly copy/paste any serial, and have the original backups on the media software comes in as well as in the emails that I get sent when I purchase software online.

For time machine to be useful to me, it has to automate what I manually did every week prior to its existence. Backup just my data, nothing else. I've gotten it to do that with excluding all but my home folder as suggested by Person Man, but I do hope eventuallly I can do what I was hoping for in the beginning and just backup specific directories, instead of excluding all but.