[MacTUG] Tweaking Timemachine on OS X server to be more granular when backing up clients

[Donald Duff-McCracken]

Hi Guys

Is anyone using TimeMachine on OS X server controlled by workgroup manager to back up clients. I am and it works great. The only thing that bugs me is that you do not have any way, through the GUI at least, to tell time machine to not back up certain directories. According to some folks on the web you can add these yourself via editing the MCX prefs in the ‘Details’ pane.

I think this should work. In fact, when I am setting up TimeMachine on a non-manged machine and tell it to exclude certain files, the plist it manually and locally generates looks exactly like this portion I have snipped out below from workgroup Manager:

[cid:3367329638_2444307]
This generates the following in the com.apple.MCX.TimeMachine.plist in the Managed Prefs folder on the local machine:
   <key>SkipPaths</key>
    <array>
        <string>/System</string>
        <string>/Applications</string>
        <string>/User/Shared</string>
        <string>/Library/Parallels</string>
        <string>dsmccrac/Library/Parallels</string>

What is interesting is that there is a second TimeMachine  plist that gets generated in the Managed Prefs folder called com.apple.TimeMachine.plist and it does not have the info in the SkipPaths array:
<integer>0</integer>
    <key>SkipPaths</key>
    <array/>
    <key>SkipSystemFiles</key>
    <true/>

Now this second plist is actually larger with more info in it, so I am thinking the MCX TimeMachine plist is used to generate it and for some reason the skippaths array info is not passed. Does anyone have any experience playing with timemachine on the server??

Thanks...
don

------------------------------------
Donald Duff-McCracken
Technical Services Manager
Mapping, Analysis & Design
Faculty of Environmental Studies
University of Waterloo
(519) 888-4567 x32151
http://www.fes.uwaterloo.ca/computing/people/don.html
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