Asking TimeMachine to only backup single user

[mac98aop]

Morning all

Is there any way of asking TimeMachine to only backup a single user on our iMac. Only mine has all the family photos, and the other accounts are full of delightful teen 'junk' none of which they're fussed about backing up.

Is there any way of excluding those user home folders please? And if so, how? I have looked online but nobody ever as helpful or clear as SMUG!

I'm basically trying to avoid buying a bigger external drive for no reason.

Thanks in advance 

Adam

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

Go to System Preferences > Time Machine > Options > exclude a folder > exclude /Users/<user you don’t want to back up>

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Regards Sam Mullen +44 (0)7747778022 in...@macambulance.com www.macambulance.com MacAmbulance Ltd. Providing Affordable Mac/PC Support and Web Development

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[mac98aop]

Thanks, Sam. I'd tried that (sorry, should have said originally) but that doesn't reduce the stated 'Estimated size of backup' value and so it seems my external HDD runs out of space even after it removes the most historic backups.

It's definitely the other Users that are taking up the space. I just need TimeMachine to properly ignore them?!?!

[mac98aop]

p.s. No 'directory size data' is stated for those excluded folders/users. It simply has '--' by them.

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

Could be that your user is unable to see the folder sizes because the excluded user folders are private to those users. Do you have previous time machine backups of that user folder already on the external drive?

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Regards Sam Mullen +44 (0)7747778022 in...@macambulance.com www.macambulance.com MacAmbulance Ltd. Providing Affordable Mac/PC Support and Web Development

MacAmbulance Ltd. is a registered company in England & Wales, registration number 8466597 This email is intended solely for the addressed recipients and may contain privileged or confidential information. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender and delete the email immediately.

On 8 May 2022, at 18:54, mac98aop <adamp...@gmail.com> wrote:

p.s. No 'directory size data' is stated for those excluded folders/users. It simply has '--' by them.

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/smug/b9d19ac7-dd2a-4244-97a2-cea2c93a5bccn%40googlegroups.com.

[mac98aop]

Thanks for the replies, Sam. It seems that the iMac caught up with itself and recognised the User Home Folders I excluded - happily backing up as we speak a far more manageable 65Gb and not 590Gb.

Thanks again. 

Adam