Don’t clutter your backups with files you’d never want to restore. Here are five methods to exclude items from Time Machine backups to keep them leaner.
xattred
When you write a comment to an article here, or edit a Property List, you’re editing XML. Two or three characters won’t work properly.
Thirty years ago, many Macs were hit by the Wdef virus, which exploited a vulnerability which remains today: it travelled in an extended attribute. Should we be worried now?
Unlike file data, metadata has varying persistence. Some is ephemeral, others sticky. macOS has inbuilt mechanisms for managing the persistence of extended attributes.
Most quarantine flags in your Mac aren’t on apps but documents. Details of how they’re added, what info they contain, and what they do.
The equivalent of cmp, only it works on extended attributes rather than file data.
Some documents can’t be opened with apps which should be able to edit them. These tools address problems with their metadata.
Fixes a minor bug, and now runs on all Macs, Intel and Apple Silicon, including Big Sur betas.
Nine more free apps available as Universal binaries, from Cirrus to xattred.
Supporting 16 different types of metadata, from Authors to Version, you don’t need to know how they are stored, etc.
The Eclectic Light Company 