Last night I downloaded BOINC and set it up to do SETI@Home. Seems to be working quite well.

In the preferences for the BOINC manager I left it at the default of 10 GB for data files. I'm wondering where those files are? The reason is that I run Time Machine and every hour it will back up files that have changed. So I'm guessing I'll fill up my TM hard drive pretty quickly if I leave SETI running all day.

I'm guessing they are in /Library/Application Support and have excluded the BOINC folder there from being backed up every hour. But I just wanted to check if there are any other locations that I should exclude to prevent SETI from taking over my Time Machine.

Thanks.

-- Rothrock

PS: And I'm excited to be joining up. I heard about this on NPR's Science Friday last week.

I wouldn't worry about time machine very much. First, the files SETI uses are small. Next, Time machine takes one back up every hour, then at the end of the day it only keeps one backup. At the end of a week, it only keeps one backup. I was able to get 6 months on 300gb storage before it started to remove older backups. I use my system for may other things and those add far more to the backup disk than SETI. Also SETI only keeps the files on your system while they are being worked on and reported on. After they are done, they are removed.

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Yes, the crunching files are in /Library/Application Support.

If you want to crunch a little faster, you can try this package.

V8 AP5 Combined

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Thanks for the info. I was thinking that since the SETI files change continuously that they would add a lot more than even a large video file that never changes. I had forgotten about the one day and one week thing.

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