Conservative exclusions under OS X

[StephenC]

Welcome to my dream world: I'm inclined to back up almost everything. What I don't want to back up are scratch files, browser caches, or other files whose loss would only affect performance the first time they were recreated. While I don't want to chase every byte, I'm hoping I can moderate the rate at which my back up sets grow.

 

To that end, I have created the selector below which I exclude from back ups (I know it only excludes caches for Mozilla and Safari). Can anyone offer additional suggestions for tuning this selector? Am I excluding something that I will regret if/when I have to do a restore? Am I making my exclusion unnecessarily complex? Does anyone know if it is safe to exclude:

 

/System/Library/Caches/*

/Library/Packages/*

 

Thanks,

S

 

--------------------------------------

Selector:

 

Enclosing folder path name does start with "Macintosh HD/Users"

and Enclosing folder path name does contain "Library/Mozilla"

and File name does match "history.dat"

 

or

 

Enclosing folder path name does start with "Macintosh HD/private/var/db"

and File name does match "locate.database"

 

or

 

Enclosing folder path name does start with "Macintosh HD/private/var/log/cups"

and File name does match "log"

 

or

 

Enclosing folder path name does start with "Macintosh HD/Library/StartupItems"

and Enclosing folder name does match "RetroRun"

 

or

 

File name does match ".DS_Store"

 

or

 

Enclosing folder path name does start with "Macintosh HD/private"

and Folder name does match "tmp"

 

or

 

Enclosing folder path name does start with "Macintosh HD/Users"

and Enclosing folder name does match ".Trash"

 

or

 

Enclosing folder path name does start with "Macintosh HD/Users"

and Enclosing folder path name does contain "Library/Mozilla"

and Folder name does match "Cache"

 

or

 

Enclosing folder path name does start with "Macintosh HD/Users"

and Enclosing folder path name does contain "Library/Caches/Safari"

 

or

 

Enclosing folder path name does start with "Macintosh HD/Library/Caches"

and File name does start with "com.apple.dock"

 

or

 

Enclosing folder path name does start with "Macintosh HD/Library/Caches"

and File name does start with "com.apple.LaunchServices"

 

or

 

Enclosing folder path name does start with "Macintosh HD/Library/Caches"

and File name does start with "com.apple.SoftwareUpdate"

[nbirnbaum]

Have you done test restores to see whether you can get a bootable system with all the major irreplaceable files back?

 

And how much backup space have you found this saves?