[dividedbyzero]

> That said I spend some time carefully picking which folders to include in the backup to avoid slowness and bloat.

What directories do you exclude? I feel like there must be lots of superfluous stuff in my backups but I don't understand macOS well enough to know for sure.

[wila]

Not OP, but you should exclude large files such as VMs [0] as those don't work well with Time Machine.

Disclaimer: I am the author of Vimalin [1], the tool that Howard references as a possible solution for VM backups.

[0] https://eclecticlight.co/2020/03/02/time-machine-15-large-fi...

[1] https://vimalin.com