Make Better Use of Cache Locations on Mac

[Haravikk]

Lately I've been noticing that a lot of my Time Machine backups are always around a 1gb or more, even when I haven't done anything that seemed to warrant it; turned out the culprit is Resilio Sync's folder under ~/Library/Application Support.

It seems that a large number of the files that are stored here (presumably indexes) are touched fairly often, causing them to be backup up at least two or three times a day, even though nothing in my sync folder(s) has changed.

I'd like to propose that indices and other non-crucial files be moved instead to a folder under ~/Library/Caches (which Time Machine ignores), as it should be possible to simply regenerate them if they're invalid. This way files under ~/Library/Application Support can be restricted only to those that are absolutely crucial (i.e- folder key(s), settings etc.).

[Haravikk]

I just wanted to bump this.

The main culprit appears to be the .journal files; these aren't necessary data (they can be recreated), along with other supporting files that aren't as large. But I'm seeing 400-500mb of changes every few hours being backed up by Time Machine for what are cache files, it's ridiculous that these are stored under Application Support.

I've moved them all to ~/Library/Caches instead and used symbolic links, though it remains to be seen if Resillio Sync will actually follow rather than overwrite them.

 

It still annoys the hell out of me that Mac developers still don't put re-creatable files under ~/Library/Caches, it's a very basic and fundamental thing to get right.

 

There are even log files under Application Support; what do you think the ~/Library/Logs folder is for?