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Speed up Time Machine backups (10.5)
Time Machine is a great feature of OS X 10.5 Leopard and it saves copies of your files at regular intervals and it even does so while you are working on other things. Like insurance policies, you hope that you will never need to use it, but if you do, you'll be glad you have it.
One slightly irritating feature of Time Machine is that it can sometimes take a long time to finish its backup job. This happens the first time that you use it because every file on the computer must be copied. It also occurs if Time Machine hasn't been running for some time, which can happen when you are out with a laptop and haven't plugged in to an external hard disk drive for a while.
You can't speed up the rate at which data is written during a backup, but you can reduce the time taken for the whole job by instructing Time Machine not to back up certain files. Of course, you wan't be able to restore any files that are not backed up, but some just don't need to be backed up. For example, files in the Downloads folder can probably be downloaded again, and you might have files that you have archived and backed up elsewhere, such as your iDisk. If you add these files and folders to Time Machine's exceptions list, they won't be backed up and the job will be finished more quickly.
Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the screen and select System Preferences from the menu that drops down. Click Time Machine in the System section and then click the Options button. Click the Plus button and then select the files or folders to exclude. You can add as many items as you want to the list. Click Done when you have added them all and close the Preferences window.
Stop Spotlight indexing everything (10.4/5)
Spotlight is brilliant, of course, and it is an excellent tool for finding items on the hard disk drive that you don't know where you've put. We've all done it - saved a file and the next day, week or month, can't find where it is.
Although Spotlight is an essential tool for Mac users, you might find tht it constantly runs in the background and wastes time and processing power indexing stuff you don't want or need indexing. An example of this is an external hard disk drive that contains files you won't need to search, or a USB flash memory drive. Plug these in and Spotlight indexes them when it's unncessary, so you should set them up as exclusions.
Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the screen and select System Preferences from the menu that drops down. Click Spotlight in the Personal section and select the Privacy tab. You'll see an empty list of excluded items. You can either click the Plus button and select the disks or folders you want to exclude, or drag them from a Finder window and drop them on the list. That's it, they won't be indexed by Spotlight.
