Nov 16, '07 07:30:00AM • Contributed by: karlfranz
For those of you who frequently download files from newsgroups, you know that you download a ton of *.rar and *.par files, but you only really care about the final resulting file. If Time Machine happens to run while you are downloading all the individual pieces, they will be retained by Time Machine, even after you think you have deleted them. This will eat up precious space on your backup drive on files you know you won't ever really want to recover.
To get around this, I created a Newsgroup Downloads folder within my regular Downloads folder. I then pointed my newsgroup clients: iGrabNews (not working with Leopard yet) and Unison to put all downloaded *.rar and *.par files into this folder. Finally, I went into the Time Machine Options in System Preferences and added the Newsgroup Downloads folder to the list of folders not to back up.
