It occurred to me recently that there's no reason to back up my sleepimage or my swap files, so I opened my archive and deleted those from the archive. Then I tried to exclude them from future backups, but since they're invisible system files it doesn't seem possible to do that. They don't show up in the Action OpenFile window, even when I've turned on "Show invisible files in Finder."

That left me wondering what other system files, etc., it's reasonable to exclude from my backups?

Ralph

Ralph Strauch wrote:It occurred to me recently that there's no reason to back up my sleepimage or my swap files, so I opened my archive and deleted those from the archive.

Your swap files and sleepimage file should be automatically excluded from captures.

One of the fixed, built-in, exclusion filters is the VM filter. When QRecall starts a capture, it examines the arguments passed to the dynamic_pager process. If a specific directory was specified, it excludes that directory from the capture. If it can't determine which directory the dynamic_pager process is using (or it can't find a dynamic_pager process), it excludes the contents of the /var/vm directory.

You can manually specify the location of the swap files by setting the QRVMSwapStorePath advanced settings to the path of your swap files. See the Advanced Settings page for the details. If you've set this property, and you're swap files are not being excluded, then consider changing it or deleting the setting and see if QRecall can determine the location itself.

If everything seems in order and QRecall isn't excluding the contents of your VM swap directory, I'd very much like to know about that.

Finally, when adding excluded items to a capture action, holding down one or both of these keys will modify the behavior of the + button:
Option allows you to exclude invisible items
Shift allows you to exclude items inside packages

I definitely had a sleepimage and swap files in my MBP backup, in /private/var/vm. They didn't come back in the next backup after I deleted them, though, so I guess it's excluding them now. Unfortunately, I didn't think to look at the dates of the files I deleted, and they don't seem to be showing up in "deleted files." The archive for my iMac did not include any swap files.

Ralph

Ralph Strauch wrote:Unfortunately, I didn't think to look at the dates of the files I deleted, and they don't seem to be showing up in "deleted files."

They won't show up as deleted files because you deleted them from the archive. A "deleted file" is a file that's been captured, but was later deleted on the source volume. But once removed entirely from the archive, it no longer exists in any form.