I’m really loving Time Machine. It’s saved me a couple of times already, and no doubt has saved others. But like a lot of Apple Products, Ver1 still needs a lot of tweaking. My biggest issue with Time Machine is the way it backs up everything by default. It’s easy to change although a bit confusing at first.It’s also easy to delete certain parts of old backups or force an immediate backup, nor does it backup NFS or SMB mounted drives, at least not easily.In addition to the above options all centrally located in Time Machine preferences, I want several more options.1.) Change how exclusion folders are defined. It’s counter-intuitive to hit the plus sign to add folders. I think a hierarchy tree with check boxes beside each folder (and perhaps the option to drill down to just a file,) would be easier. Check means it gets backed up, no check means it’s not touched.2.) Have auto-delete of folders preset. Even being able to delete all backups older then a certain date would be nice. I’ve already ran into this problem twice with Time Machine saying it can’t backup anything more as the hard drive was full. Granted this was my fault as I forgot to exclude Leopard’s Download directory which changes very often on my machine. I ended up simply wiping the drive and then forcing an immediate backup to get Time Machine to quit nagging me. Heck, even being able to delete old backups of folders that have had a certain percentage of their files changed would be nice. Perhaps even a way to search folders that have changed file size heavily and delete older versions. Add in some logic such as “this folder changed 14 days ago and the old version has 1.2gb of data that is old,” would help a lot.3.) If Applications are not being backed up, I want the associated Application Support Folder to automatically not be backed up either. For instance if Garageband or iDVD are installed this folder holds several gigs of data that is pretty much useless, and will get reinstalled as part of the Applications reinstall anyways . BUT, there are a lot of other folders in there that do need to be backed up. An even better idea would be to backup only the folders that have actually been changed by the user. This would be mostly preferences and such and as essentially text files the savings wouldn’t be that much.I have the feeling that some of these option will be in version 2 of Time Machine. Apple is a big fan of making some big improvements in the version 2 of everything so that people actually want to upgrade. I’d be satisfied if they just centrally located all the options, and made it more obvious/easier to track the files that are being backed up.

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