de/activate and Time Machine

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Apr 28, 2016, at 3:35 AM, René J.V. Bertin <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good, so it should indeed be possible to come up with a script or the like that sets up Time Machine to do only an "economic" kind of backing up of ${prefix}. Supposing that all ports that do use site-specific configuration files store those files under etc/ .
> I'll try to find a moment to figure out to what extent keeping an additional list of which ports are active is required.
> 
> I just think of a complication though. The port command is installed in bin/ together with a few others, and there are probably libraries "base" uses that live in lib/ . It's probably possible to add those to Time Machine's filter list but it does make the idea a bit less appealing.

IIRC there is some metadata that you can set to exclude a file from backup (a little googling says it's probably com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem) - it might be interesting to patch base to set this (along with possibly adding some sort of 'restore' action which will do the deactivate/reactivate dance).

-- 
Daniel J. Luke