Time Machine and work directory
As you say with each little change in a file will mean it will be backed up again by Time Machine. Often this makes hardly any sense and will bloat the Time Machine backup drive unnecessarily.
I recommend excluding folders that contain large files and change often from Time Machine backups. To do so, go to System Preferences > Time Machine > Options > +. My exclusion list includes the following paths:
- Download folder
/Users/[me]/Downloads - My virtual machines (Parallels Windows, etc.)
/Users/[me]/VMs - Caches, such as Spotify
/Users/[me]/Library/Application Support/Spotify/PersistentCache - Dropbox folders
/Users/[me]/Dropbox
Naturally you should decide for yourself what is meaningful to exclude on your machine and have another backup strategy for those files.
Alternatively, or on top of that you can use the free utility TimeMachineEditor to lower the time interval of backups (default is one hour). From the webpage:
TimeMachineEditor is a software for macOS that lets you change the default one-hour backup interval of Time Machine. You can change the interval or create other types of scheduling (see the screenshots below).
This is useful if you don’t need to backup every hour and don’t want the performance penalty. For example you might be frequently creating or modifying files which would cause long-running backup operations throughout the day.
