![]() We’ve shown you how to find your largest files in macOS. RELATED: What Is Taking Up That "Other" Storage in macOS? Large Files That You Might Not Need Backed Up If you find applications that take up a lot of space on your Mac, consider excluding them from your backups. Things like Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite are easy to re-download later, and constant updates mean you’re probably backing up new copies of these applications with some frequency. Head to your Applications folder and look for large programs that you could easily reinstall. If you’re still running out of space, you might want to apply the same logic used for games to other large applications. Large Applications You Can Easily Get Back We recommend doing a one-time backup of your virtual machines to some other hard drive and excluding them from your Time Machine backups. This is less of a problem if you use Parallels, which is built with this in mind, but other virtual machines can struggle with it. Each virtual hard drive is a single file, meaning every time you use your virtual machine, a 20 GB+ file needs to be re-backed up. If you’ve created virtual machines to use Windows or Linux applications on your Mac, it’s probably a good idea to exclude those from your backup. RELATED: Beginner Geek: How to Create and Use Virtual Machines But if your cloud service does not provide this feature, you probably don’t want to exclude those files from your Time Machine backup, since you may not be fully covered if you accidentally delete an important file. Keeping that caveat in mind, though, you can probably leave such folders out of your Time Machine backups. Dropbox, for example, gives you 30 days, and keeps older versions of the files it has-just like a backup. Most cloud services offer a grace period to recover deleted files. If you’re syncing files to other devices, as well, then you have those files stored in other locations as well. If you’re using Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, or any other syncing service, you already have those files stored in at least two locations-on your local drive and in the cloud. Your Dropbox Folder, or Any Folder You’re Already Syncing But if you’re interested in seeing the complete list of folders excluded by default (or just want to prove to yourself that something is excluded), here’s how to do it. If just knowing that system-level stuff is already excluded is enough for you, go ahead and skip the rest of this section. So you don’t need to worry about excluding system-level things like logs and caches-Time Machine already has you covered. And you know how you can use Time Machine even if your drive isn’t plugged in? The local backups that make that possible are also not backed up, as that would be redundant. Time Machine already excludes a bunch of things you don’t need backed up: your Trash, caches, and indexes. RELATED: PSA: You Can Use Time Machine Even If Your Backup Drive Isn't Plugged In What Does Time Machine Exclude By Default? But which folders can be safely disabled? And are any disabled by the system already? Let’s take a look. Some more options will slide down, giving you the ability to exclude particular folders from your backups. To exclude a folder, just head to System Preferences > Time Machine > Options. We’ve shown you how to back up and restore files with Time Machine, including how to exclude particular folders from being backed up. RELATED: How to Back Up Your Mac and Restore Files With Time Machine Are you getting notifications about a full Time Machine drive? Do you feel like your backups are taking too long? A bigger, faster hard drive might be the best solution, but you can also help by excluding particular folders from your backups.
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