Backuping the following folders can eat up hundreds of gigabytes on the backup storage, and can cause significant performance reduction if the backup drive is a HDD (some of them can contains millions of files).
- /Applications/Xcode
- /Applications/Xcode-beta
- ~/.gradle
- ~/.npm
- ~/.composer
- ~/.cocoapods
- ~/.android/avd
- ~/Library/Application Support/JetBrains/Toolbox/apps
- ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Application Cache
- ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData
- ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS DeviceSupport
- {path to a node project}/node_modules
By removing these folders from the backups and excluding them in the System Preferences, the backup process can be faster and will consume less storage space.