Time Machine

We had an incident with our computer and lost our hard drive. Luckily, we were using Time Machine on the Mac and it's amazing to just plug the computer in again and everything works great! That was a huge relief to be able to know that everything was backed up. Anyway, occasionally when I'm looking to save space on the backups, because Time Machine definitely does not worry about that, I exclude certain folders that just balloon quickly because a large file might change and then it backs everything up again. Here's the list of ones I do exclude, although I sometimes add or remove others:

• /Users/user/Library/Caches
• /Users/user/Library/Mail
• /Users/user/Library/Thunderbird/ImapMail
• /Users/user/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Podcasts

These seem to help a lot and I don't have to worry if I lose them because that information is not essential to my long term needs.