Excluding Files from Backup

To exclude files from your backup, click on your backup plan on the left under “Active Backups”. Then click the Edit button bottom right.

Click the third section (“Exclude…”).

Wildcard Excludes

Exclude rules can be filenames, paths, or path fragments and can include wildcards ? (to match a single character) or * (to match 0 or more characters). For example:

.Trash matches every file/folder named “.Trash”.

/Users/alice/junk matches 1 specific folder.

iTunes/iTunes Media matches any folder called “iTunes Media” located within a folder called “iTunes”.

*.log matches any file/folder whose name ends with “.log”.

file?.txt matches filenames like ‘file0.txt’, ‘fileA.txt’, etc.

data???.bin matches filenames like ‘data000.bin’, ‘data123.bin’, ‘dataabc.bin’, etc.

Skip Items Excluded by Time Machine Rules

This option tells Arq to exclude anything that Time Machine would exclude.

Note: This may include things that you’d rather not exclude, such as your Photos Library’s database.