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Is it advisable to exclude ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Session\ Storage/ from Time Machine backups? It certainly sounds like a prime candidate, but I am unable to find confirmation anywhere, which surprises me given that Chrome is fairly widely used.

kuzzooroo
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  • What's the reason you're looking at excluding this? – M K Jun 21 '14 at 05:22
  • @MK - I'm looking at excluding this so that it doesn't occupy a bunch of space on my Time Machine drive. BackupLoupe tells me that the contents of the folder have been changing a lot, though to be fair the total size of the folder is fairly small. – kuzzooroo Jun 21 '14 at 14:09

1 Answers1

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Since you're concerned about this occupying space unnecessarily, you could the exclude the folder. While you're at it, you could exclude the following folders since the rest (apart from Session Storage) are not useful to backup repeatedly/regularly either:

~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Session Storage
~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Local Storage
~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Application Cache

In more recent versions of Chrome/OS X, these folders may be located in:

/Users/$USER/Library/Caches/Google/

Note that excluding Session Storage will prevent your sessions from being backed up - so you cannot restore back to older sessions from a backup.
Excluding Local Storage will prevent restoring the storage used by some/many web sites that use local storage to store information (to support offline use or for longer term identification).

user3439894
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M K
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  • Thanks @MK. Just to be clear, there are three folders total that one might exclude here: Session Storage; Local Storage; and Application Cache--right? – kuzzooroo Jun 21 '14 at 21:52
  • Yes, that's right. You could exclude these three folders. – M K Jun 22 '14 at 05:33
  • In more recent versions of Chrome/OS X, these folders may be located in

    ~Users/USERNAME/Library/Caches/Google/

     – Fiksdal May 10 '16 at 09:27
  • And it looks to me from /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist like ~/Library/Caches is excluded from Time Machine backups by default. – kuzzooroo May 19 '16 at 05:04
  • @kuzzooroo -- that file does not appear to exist on Big Sur 11.6.2 https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/25779/on-os-x-what-files-are-excluded-by-rule-from-a-time-machine-backup#comment629536_25833 – Dave X Mar 02 '22 at 14:34