Reports on items the user has excluded from Time Machine backups. One time alerts are triggered when changes are made.
Exclusions List
The Time Machine Exclusions Plugin reports on items excluded from their Time Machine. This allows for quick verfication of excluded items without having to dive into the Time Machine Preference Pane.
When an end user changes what is excluded from the Time Machine backup, a one time alert will be sent.
Apple's tmutil will not allow you to add or remove items that do not exist on the computer with the tmutil removeexclusion
.
These are defined in the .exclusions.plist. The non-default exclusions are stored in the ExcludeByPath
array in /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist
. These are not shown to an end user in the Time Machine System Preference pane though Watchman Monitoring displays them for the TimeMachine Plugin on your Dashboard. Those paths can be found in the SkipPaths
array within the same file.
Note that /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist
is a binary plist and will need to be converted to an XML plist in order to edit, then converted back to a binary plist. You can convert the plist to XML with the following command:
plutil -convert xml1 /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist
And, convert it back with:
plutil -convert binary1 /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist
BBEdit will perform this conversion automatically.
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