I noticed I was making .75GB Time Machine backups when I hadn't really created any new content. I don't back up my system, just my personal files and data. I back up my dev stuff, even though it's in some sort of off-site, cloud-based source control.
I found this great tool, TimeTracker.app, that opens your Time Machine backups and tells you quickly what's in each. I realized TM was backing up some homebrew directories (/var, /opt, /private) and some other system stuff. The problem was that when I went to exclude them from the Time Machine preferences, the finder couldn't see these directories. So I tracked down the plist file that stores all the TM prefs. It was in
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist
I tried to edit that file, but it's a compressed/encrypted plist file. I didn't want to mess with the uncompress/edit/compress process for every change. I did find out that TextWrangler will edit compressed plist files.
Then I stumbled upon tmutil, a command line tool that will make changes to that file. For example...
sudo tmutil addexclusion -p "/opt"
added that file to the exclude list. Them can be removed with "removeexclusion". You can even check if a single file or directory will be excluded with
sudo tmutil isexcluded "/Users/scott/bin"
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