Excluding Index from Time Machine

Mike Binks said:

Hi Folks

Somewhere it was suggested that it was a good idea to exclude Logos index from time machine backups.

It this true?

Does it make much difference?

How do you do it?

Would this instructions make a useful addition to the 'New to Logos' post at the top of this forum?

Thanks in anticipation

tootle pip

Mike

Excluding Logos index from Time Machine backups allows other files to be kept longer - how much longer depends on size of indexes (and frequency of change).

System Preferences has Time Machine:

Clicking "Options..." shows excluded items (used "+" to add exclusions):

First 4 exclusions are external USB hard drive partitions (old preference - explanation below)

Next 4 exclusions begin with ~/Library; "qofvuuiv.015" is random folder name - different for every Logos user.  Personally choosing to exclude BibleIndex, HomePage, LibraryIndex, and folder with resource mstidx files (suspect master index - believe can rebuild with resource scan command).

When alpha testing case-sensitive file system issue - lots of resource copying, identifying, and crashing - used Disk Utility to create Logos4.dmg file and hdiutil to mount - did not initially exclude from Time Machine backup - lost older backups since ran out of space (hourly backups of few GB that changed often).

Last 2 exclusions are virtual machine hard drive images - changed from VMWare Fusion to VirtualBox during computer upgrade this year.

Personal preference - like partitioning Macintosh hard drives - internal disk has 3 partitions:

External USB drive  (upgrade last month) has 4 partitions:

Note: virtual machine disk images can be manually copied from Valet volume to z-Valet when virtual machine shut down or asleep (not yet done) - have doubts about usability of incremental virtual disk image backups - also can rebuild virtual machine.

Personally like idea of bootable partition that can be upgraded without changing/copying lots of other files.  After Mac OS X 10.7 ships (hopefully), plan to copy internal bootable partitions before upgrading them - have option to boot Mac OS X 10.6 (just in case).

Some currently shipping commercial programs do not work on Case-Sensitive file system - hence xMacOS partition since some development teams choose to disagree on use of shift and/or caps lock when typing file names. Kudos to Apple and Logos development for Case consistency.

Keep Smiling [:)]

Alan Macgregor said:

I've been blithely using Time Machine with an external 200GB HDD since 27th November. I've just left it to backup everything. So far it has used almost exactly half of its available disk space, so I guess that it will run for about a year before it needs to start deleting older backups

I allow all L4 Mac files to back up with Time Machine on a 500GB drive. My oldest backup is November 09, 2009. It would be longer, but I let it back up a Parallels VM for 2 days.

Alan Macgregor said:

I cannot imagine a recovery scenario where I would want to regress more than a day or two

I found it useful to retrieve a 9-month old file during an IRS Audit of our corporate tax return (IRS = Internal Revenue Service), but we would still have be alright without it.