Confusion about what BackBlaze is excluding during backups

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1

I recently purchased a new mac mini. It’s running the latest OS.
I have an external drive attached running Time Machine and I have BackBlaze running.
Various files are automatically excluded in the BackBlaze configuration. But when I log on to the website to view my backed up files, I see folders that look like they could be what’s listed in the BackBlaze configuration (see screen shots). Are these folders actually different.

I don’t yet understand the nomenclature of Mac OS. On my Windows laptop, there’s the system folder, programs folder and the users folder (with sub directories I can redirect). How does that translate into the Mac OS?

Screenshot 2025-05-06 at 5.25.57 AM
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Screenshot 2025-05-06 at 5.27.52 AM
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2

The excluded folders are prefix based, so if you had the exact same settings on a Windows machine, The app would not back up c:\Applications, d:\Applications, etc., but c:\users\jeremy\Applications would still be backed up. I just checked my machine, and it seems on Windows the exclusions would look something like *:\Applications, not the /Applications shown here.

So unless /Users/jeremyschubert would actually be something like D:\ on Windows, everything looks normal.

Actually, I wonder if they ever added wildcards in the middle of the path for excluded folders?

3

Yes, that looks right and comparable to my MacBook. It doesn’t back up system files, just your files, it also excludes things like virtual machine disk images and ISO images as standard.

I was worried about the /home folder, but Apple uses /Users instead and my /home was protected and empty, when I looked at it in the Terminal.

4

Thank you both.
Going off on a bit of a tangent…
On my Windows computer, I can redirect the subfolders under my user account folder to different locations. For example, under my user folder, a shortcut (alias in Mac terms I believe) called My Documents shows up. And that shortcut leads to a different location where my documents actually are stored. So I can have a smaller system hard drive or partition and a whopping big hard drive or partition to store my documents. Is there a similar setup for Mac OS?

5

You should be able to do that with a soft link or symbolic link. The linked article walks through setting up the links or aliases.

I would experiment with it and make sure it works as you want, before you start moving your document directory around and linking to it.