Why Time machine don't exclude folders?

Sorry to say but I don't understand your question either.

Allan

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

No. A good English sentence with proper grammar would be a big help.

Allan

Hi royal,

I'll try to help

I think you are saying that you have chosen to exclude a folder (or several) from the Time Machine backup but the folder is included anyway.

If I'm right then maybe someone will answer, I don't use Time Machine

If I am wrong then .......

Not only I think this is what royalstark meant, I can also confirm that many excluded folders are still backed up.

I think it only applies to ~user/ folders (that is, folders starting with '/' are properly excluded).

Maybe the fact that I have case sensitive filesystem is also relevant. Some programs misbehave with this setup, though I do not expect this from Apple software…

Allan tends not to be the most patient person. Sorry for that reaction to your question here. One should not make the assumption that everyone here is a native English-speaker

If you exclude a folder from your backup, I don't think that that removes previously-backed-up versions of that folder from your backup. So, if you're seeing it in old backups, that may be normal. OTOH, if you have excluded it and are still seeing it, there may be a problem with your backups. Try looking at the Time Machine Troubleshooting Guide.

Hopefully our resident Time Machine guru, Pondini, will spot this and help out, but he's been a bit scarce around here lately. I'll see if I can find him and direct him here.

Thomas,

You are indeed correct that if the file has been backed up previously it will not be deleted from the Time Machine backup when you exclude it.

@Royal Stark:

What you are seeing is an old folder that was previously backed up.

Time Machine does not delete old backups of folders when you exclude a folder from the backup.

With how Time Machine works, it will always show the old backup data. If you would like to remove the "Downloads" folder from all previous backups, do the following:

Enter the Time Machine Interface. (You can do so either by clicking on the icon in your menu bar, and selecting "Enter Time Machine" or by clicking on the Time Machine Application in "Applications"

Select the "Downloads" folder. Click on the Gear icon in the Finder Menu Bar. There will be a "Delete all instances" option, click that and it will remove all instances.

-Phill

As others have posted, the exclusions only apply to new backups; and you can delete all previous backups of selected items if you want, as prbsparx says, or see #12 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.

You can exclude things outside user folders, if you want.

The other thing that sometimes causes a problem is if you have multiple user accounts, and you want the same things excluded from 2 or more of them. In that case, you need to exclude the item for each account. See the tan box in #10 of the FAQ for details.

If you're still having trouble, or something isn't clear, please post back.

You can exclude things outside user folders, if you want.

Sorry for confusion, what I meant is that folders excluded as ~user/ are not properly excluded. I'm not sure about original poster, but I have just put down my file server preparing for the move, so I won't be able to confirm it anytime soon.

Thanks for your comment, though.

If you mean they're still excluded, from ongoing backups, that's almost always caused by a corrupted preference file. A "full reset" per #A4 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting ought to solve it.

If not, we have seen a very few cases here where the installation of OSX was damaged; reinstalling OSX (that won't affect anything else) fixed it. See Installing the ''combo'' update and/or Reinstalling OSX.

True, OSX sometimes does odd things with a case-sensitive installation, but I've never seen a report of exclusion problems as a result.

Same problem here. I can exclude folders on the root but not inside users' home. Things I've done:

- multiple time machine full reset

- os reinstall

- create a new users from scratch.

No way!

I have a macbook pro 2011 with Mac Os 10.6.7 (case insensitive installation).

I've tried to install 10.6.7 combo update but system refuses to do because not compatible.

During backup TM reaches the expected backup size and after it continues counting GBs over the expected size. If I don't stop the backup it reaches 220 GB despite I've excluded everything but the Desktop folder that has only some files.

Log is following:

Starting standard backup

Backing up to: /Volumes/Untitled/Backups.backupdb

2011-05-28 00:53:06.742 FindSystemFiles[2390:907] Looking for system packages

2011-05-28 00:53:10.533 FindSystemFiles[2390:907] Using system path cache.

Backup content size: 229.8 GB excluded items size: 228.8 GB for volume Macintosh HD

No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.18 GB requested (including padding), 232.27 GB available

Alberto, that log looks like it's only going to backup 1.18 GB. Have you actually backed it up and then looked to see how much it has backed up?

It appears that Time Machine will scan your whole system including excluded items (a waste of processing power...), but does not actually backup your whole system.

At the end, it has exceeded 100gb!

To test the exclude feature I removed everything but a folder in my home.

The backup has excluded folders on the root level but took the whole home.

To recover from this problem I had to completely reinstall system, or rather to remove (rm -r) all the folders with the exception of /Applications and /Users and reinstall the system from scratch.

The archive and reistall feature of Snow Leopard didn't fix the problem.