de/activate and Time Machine

René J.V. Bertin rjvbertin at gmail.com
Tue Apr 26 04:19:10 PDT 2016


Hi,

I'm probably not the only one who noticed: after deactivating and reactivating a large port like Qt5, the next Time Machine backup announces (or at least claims) to have much more to backup that one would expect (over 1.5Gb in case for Qt5). That suggests that the backup engine looks at more than just file name, size and date alone; possibly taking the inode number or equivalent into account too.

Is there a good way to exclude most of MacPorts from being backed up while retaining the possibility to reinstall without rebuilding? I'm thinking of backing up selected bits from var/macports (notably the registry and software directory), probably etc/macports and libexec/macports. There's however the issue of user config files; are there designated locations to install such files?
I have already excluded var/macports/{build,log}.

Superfluous backing up of course ends up wasting significant amount of space on the backup disk esp. for developers who regularly to something like `port -n upgrade --force` after an incremental rebuild with only minimal changes. It is also costly in terms of time when you're using a NAS like my Time Capsule (even when connected via a wired gigabit connection).

Thanks,
René


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