Find What's Being Excluded from Backups and Remove Backup Exclusion Metadata

Jul 16, '12 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: kirkmc

Time Machine uses a specific metadata attribute to know which files and folders not to back up. We had a hint to that effect back in 2005.

It turns out that CrashPlan, the cloud backup service, uses the same metadata to determine what to back up. Macworld's Lex Friedman pointed me to a CrashPlan support article that looks at this, and that shows how to remove the exclusion metadata. To do so, you run the following command in Terminal:

 xattr -d com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem <filename>
The CrashPlan article mentions this in particular to be able to back up VMWare virtual machines, which, oddly, have this attribute set.

After setting the attribute, you can run this command to make sure it's stuck:
sudo mdfind "com_apple_backup_excludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
You'll find a list of files that Mac OS X excludes by default.

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Mac OS X Hints
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