Controll TimeMachine from terminal

You can enable sudo tmutil enable or disable sudo tmutil disable from command line. If you want to run a Time Machine backup right away, just run tmutil startbackup or tmutil stopbackup if you ever want to stop a backup.

Local snapshots

Follow command will disable and delete “local snapshots”:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

You can turn local snapshots back on by running:

sudo tmutil enablelocal

Exclude selected folders

sudo tmutil addexclusion ~/Downloads

There is interesting property -p that controls whether or not folder remains in exclusion when is moved. If you use the above command with the -p flag, then it will not be sticky.

If you are developer there is few quite common folders that should be excluded:

sudo tmutil addexclusion ~/.composer
sudo tmutil addexclusion ~/.npm
sudo tmutil addexclusion ~/Library/Developer
sudo tmutil addexclusion ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/

List excluded

sudo mdfind "com_apple_backup_excludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"

Get Time Machine stats

tmutil listbackups