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Mac OS X

Time Machine

Time Machine, by default, is awfully simple with no easy way to control what is backed up - it's all or nothing. Except, there are some things that it just wouldn't make sense for Apple to toss into the backups willy-nilly, like the /dev directory for instance. So how do these types of items get excluded?

It turns out that there is an exclusions list kept here: /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist. This blog provides a bit of detail on how this works.

My Time Machine target is about 1/2 the size of my MacBook hard disk, so I'd like to keep the TM backups to a reasonable size. With the new Apple TV we'll be adding videos to iTunes and these won't be small files, we've got about 40 GB after just a few days (Thanks, Sean!). Since these files are on the MacBook and on the Apple TV, they don't really need to be in the TM backups.

So I modified the exclusions list for TM by editing the StdExclusions.plist file from a terminal window:

$> cd /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources
$> sudo nano StdExclusions.plist

I added a line to the contents excluded section to exclude the iTunes movies directory:

       <key>ContentsExcluded</key>
       <array>
               <string>/Volumes</string>
               <string>/Network</string>
               <string>/automount</string>
               <string>/.vol</string>
               <string>/tmp</string>
               <string>/cores</string>
               <string>/private/tmp</string>
               <string>/private/Network</string>
               <string>/private/tftpboot</string>                  
               <string>/private/var/automount</string>
               <string>/private/var/folders</string>
               <string>/private/var/run</string>
               <string>/private/var/tmp</string>
               <string>/private/var/vm</string>
               <string>/private/var/db/dhcpclient</string>
               <string>/private/var/db/fseventsd</string>
               <string>/Library/Caches</string>
               <string>/Library/Logs</string>
               <string>/System/Library/Caches</string>
               <string>/System/Library/Extensions/Caches</string>
               <string>/Users/blair/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Movies</string>  
       </array>

Now when TM runs, it creates the directory .../Movies but doesn't copy any of the files into it. Thus the iTunes directory structure is correct, but the large movie files are not included.

Windows

So, what can you say about Windows?

• Stay away from Vista
• Can't tell whether 7 is any good yet
• Use nLite Slipstream to install XP with SP3 all at once
• Why not just go with Ubuntu desktop if you don't play any PC games?