more ignore reccomendations

[Dewdman42]

I'm trying to trim down the size of my SD backup a bit. One thing I ignored is my IMAP mail cache:

/Users/xxx/Library/Mail/IMAP-xxx@yyy.com/

There is really no need to include it, it gets big and if I have to restore, all my mail is on the IMAP server anyway.

Looking for some other things to exclude. I know the default backup all script already excludes quite a few OS related files, but I'm thinking perhaps there are some more that could easily be excluded and want to hear comments or warnings from you guys about some or suggestions for others:

~/Library/Caches/
/Library/Caches/
/System/Library/Caches

What about temp files and particularly spotlight files? I'd like to make sure they are excluded as well. where are they?

Anything else you can think of of significant size?

[dnanian]

Honestly, disk space is cheap. Don't do this. It takes a long time for a lot of mail to resync from your server (and if you accidentally delete email, you won't have the cached local copy on the backup).

[Dewdman42]

I wish to do it.

Also my mail provider has deleted mail recovery features. I really don't need it in the backup. I keep a big history of mail around, it consumes GB's in my AppleMail local storage.

Also I prefer to rebuild the Mail from IMAP server in the case of restore.

Same with flushing all those cashes. There are numerous utilities for flushing the cache and other files of this nature. If that is a good idea to do occasionally, then why not exclude from the backup too?

I think there are font caches and other things too I could exclude, but I'm still figuring out where those are.

[Dewdman42]

Along a similar vein, excluding /.Spotlight-V100/ will not save much space, but I like the idea that spotlight will be forced to rebuild its indexes on restore.

[dnanian]

Do not do so: we already handle .Spotlight-V100 specially, and preserve the index on the destination.

[Dewdman42]

if I want the index to be forced to rebuild on restore?

[dnanian]

I understand, but you asked for recommendations and I provided mine.

Of course, feel free to do as you wish. But my advice is to do something else, and I hope that others who might follow this thread heed my advice rather than yours.