Infected email breaking OSX TimeMachine backups

Having been away from home a lot recently, it had been a while since my laptop had been backed up by TimeMachine. After a few attempts though it got a bit annoying as McAfee kept interrupting the process. The problem seemed to be that the backups contained infected emails:

201511324_151187-CapturFilesMcAfee was blocking TM from writing infected emails to the backup drive.

As it turns out, I recalled fixing this once before (although I never blogged about it). So how could it have come unpicked? Looking at my TM backup exclusions, the exclusion that I added was still in place:

201511324_151132-CapturFilesBut my whole mail folder should be more than 8KB!… Then it clicked. I hadn't done a TM backup since updating to OSX El Capitan.

After clicking the “+” button to add a new rule, I navigated to my mail folder.

  1. In the finder window, hit Cmd + Shift + G.
  2. Enter ~/Library/Mail
  3. Click Go

Aha! There's now a “V3” folder…

201511324_151100-CapturFiles

I selected it and clicked “Exclude”. Bingo! 5.5Gb sounds more like it.

201511324_151165-CapturFilesAnd like that, TimeMachine works again.