more ignore reccomendations
 

I'm trying to trim down the size of my SD backup a bit. One thing I ignored is my IMAP mail cache:

/Users/xxx/Library/Mail/IMAP-xxx@yyy.com/

There is really no need to include it, it gets big and if I have to restore, all my mail is on the IMAP server anyway.

Looking for some other things to exclude. I know the default backup all script already excludes quite a few OS related files, but I'm thinking perhaps there are some more that could easily be excluded and want to hear comments or warnings from you guys about some or suggestions for others:

~/Library/Caches/
/Library/Caches/
/System/Library/Caches

What about temp files and particularly spotlight files? I'd like to make sure they are excluded as well. where are they?

Anything else you can think of of significant size?

Honestly, disk space is cheap. Don't do this. It takes a long time for a lot of mail to resync from your server (and if you accidentally delete email, you won't have the cached local copy on the backup).

I wish to do it.

Also my mail provider has deleted mail recovery features. I really don't need it in the backup. I keep a big history of mail around, it consumes GB's in my AppleMail local storage.

Also I prefer to rebuild the Mail from IMAP server in the case of restore.

Same with flushing all those cashes. There are numerous utilities for flushing the cache and other files of this nature. If that is a good idea to do occasionally, then why not exclude from the backup too?

I think there are font caches and other things too I could exclude, but I'm still figuring out where those are.

Along a similar vein, excluding /.Spotlight-V100/ will not save much space, but I like the idea that spotlight will be forced to rebuild its indexes on restore.

I understand, but you asked for recommendations and I provided mine.

Of course, feel free to do as you wish. But my advice is to do something else, and I hope that others who might follow this thread heed my advice rather than yours. :)

Do not do so: we already handle .Spotlight-V100 specially, and preserve the index on the destination.

if I want the index to be forced to rebuild on restore?

Are the Caches ok to exclude in your opinion?

well you talked me into keeping the mail. only because a test restore shows that Mail was confused by leaving out the big data dir. If I knew how to cleanly exclude it I would, but I don't know how, so oh well.

Hope its ok to exclude Caches, Seems like it should be but depends on the apps that have been using them I guess.

But gosh. My Mail folder is 6GB by itself, 30% of the entire backup. There must be a way to cleanly exclude that.

You can always add your drive into Privacy and remove it if you want Spotlight to rebuild its cache. But why would you want to? It's supposed to keep itself current.

Although you can likely exclude some caches, again, why? The caches will provide you with a faster running system when you restore, and as such will get you back on your feet more quickly, at the cost of a tiny amount of disk space and a negligible amount of time.

The same goes for your local Mail cache. Sure, it's 6GB, but if you're only changing a few hundred K every day, it's not much to update. Just isn't a big deal.

For spotlight I just like the idea that it will rebuild the index clean after a restore. I routinely run Onyx anyway to rebuild it. That one is not strictly that important, its not a big file anyway. But in my mind it doesn't hurt to just exclude the spotlight DB and let it rebuild when I boot first time.

The Mail I really wish I could exclude now cleanly, but I don't know how. Its 30% of my backup data now.

The Caches I think why not? The other day JungleDisk left 15GB of "crap" in the caches dir, it was just some kind of failed error report image or something which I really don't want on my backup. It doubled the size of my backup. so then I started thinking to myself there are utilities to empty the cache dirs, why not just exclude them. Cache data is more or less temporary in nature most of the time. Not sure about Jungle Disk. I'm taking that off the computer though, I'll only use it from the windows machine probably.