/System/Library/Caches not excluded

Hi,

I'm new to QRecall, so I check the archives more often, just to make sure everything works as expected.

Today I noticed my daily system backup archive, which backs up the system partition (except my user folder) once per day has been making a daily catch of more than 1GB in size even when I did not install/update any applications during that day.

After some digging, I realized QRecall is backing up the whole /System/Library/Caches folder, despite the fact that "Items Excluded by Time Machine" has been checked in my daily Capture action's filter settings. And one file named "data" inside a folder called "com.apple.coresymbolicationd" is the main culprit, for it's 800+MB large, and it changes every day.

I thought /System/Library/Caches is excluded by the Time Machine, is it not?

Anyway, I've excluded it manually, so it's not a big deal. A quick check found that /Library/Caches is indeed ignored by QR. Don't have time to do a thorough check yet.

edit: forgot to mention: my system is Yosemite 10.10.1.

Ming-Li,

I'm surprised too, but I'm beginning to suspect that Time Machine has some exclusion rules hard-wired, and those aren't reflected in the set of folder it claims to exclude.

Sadly, your version of Recall also has a bug that fails to exclude the /System/Library/Caches folder when you select the "Exclude caches" option. (This is fixed in a later version, which also correctly excludes any networked cache folders too.)

The manual exclusion you added will work just fine for now.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

Just checked my system backup archive against Time Machine's standard exclusion plist (/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist), and here's a list of folders excluded by TM but not by QR, for your reference:

# PathsExcluded

/Library/Updates
/private/var/db/efw_cache
/private/var/db/Spotlight
/private/var/db/systemstats

# ContentsExcluded

/private/var/db/dhcpclient
/Library/Logs

# FileContentsExcluded

/private/var/log
/private/var/spool/cups

# UserPathsExcluded

Library/Logs
Library/PubSub/Database

There are others that I suspect QR doesn't exclude either, but their content is empty on my system so I couldn't tell. E.g.: /private/var/spool/fax & /private/var/spool/uucp in the "FileContentsExcluded" group, and "Library/PubSub/Feeds" in the "UserPathsExcluded" group.

Most of these take relatively little space so I don't really care. In the cases of /private/var/log & /Library/Logs, I'm happy QR backs them up.

Ming-Li

Thanks for taking the time to detail the differences you found between QRecall and Time Machine. I've seen similar discrepancies here, which reinforces my suspicion and Time Machine has its own internal set of exclusion rules, beyond those flagged by the system's "do not backup" list.

I can also appreciate Time Machine's aversion to backing up log files and databases. Without QRecall's block-level de-duplciation, these would quickly consume all of the available backup storage.

Luckily, we don't have that problem.