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I am reaching the capacity limit of my Time Machine drive.
Instead of purging snapshots from way back when, I'd like to just delete the backups of large files that I definitely do not need (such as the contents of the Downloads folder).
It seems that the "Delete all backups of selected files" would work here.
I am just a little worried that this could do such additional "magic" under the hood, rather than just deleting the old backups. For example: Prevent future versions of the file from being backed up, or causing the files to be also deleted from other Time Machine drives that I attach later.
Can someone confirm that none of this happens?
ockquote>
'but I'm not sure it will do the magic you want.' That is fine, I wanted it to NOT do any magic.
– Thilo – 2009-08-11T00:51:45.993As for excluding stuff from the backup, I do not want to do that, at least not for all TimeMachine volumes. I have an "online" backup disk that is always connected (and has still enough disk space), and an "off-site" disk that I connect every two weeks to take a snapshot. The "off-site" disk is almost full, so I want to put only really important stuff on there, but still keep everything and the kitchen sink on the "online" disk. – Thilo – 2009-08-11T00:54:22.870
I did exclude Applications, but when my laptop HD crashed it was painful finding the disks for Office suites/ iLife etc, remembering what to download etc. was a real pain. I don't exclude this folder any more - it's not like it changes much. – alimack – 2010-10-18T08:28:04.677
For Dropbox, you may also need to exclude
~/.dropbox/cache
or maybe even the whole folder? – Arjan – 2009-08-12T15:13:49.613Interesting, I wasn't aware of ~/.dropbox. Currently my ~/Dropbox is 2.2M but ~/.dropbox is 28K – Doug Harris – 2009-08-13T14:54:31.760