How I backup old dev projects

I just got a new Macbook (M1Pro - so stoked!) - and am now going through the exercise of backing up old files and projects from the old laptop. While I'd prefer to quickly copy everything and move on, my old Developer directory was over 90GB in size - which is ridiculous for the ~40 various little projects I spun up over time.

I really only need to backup my code, not node_modules, etc.

Here's a script to accomplish this - it recursively deletes all node_modules directories from the current working directory:

find . -name 'node_modules' -type d -prune -exec rm -rf '{}' +

I took this and extended it to other bloatful directories which I don't need to backup, things like build artifacts, .gradle caches, Pods dependencies, etc. As a mainly JS/TS & React Native developer, I used this set:

find . -name 'node_modules' -type d -prune -exec rm -rf '{}' +
find . -name 'Pods' -type d -prune -exec rm -rf '{}' +
find . -name '.git' -type d -prune -exec rm -rf '{}' +
find . -name 'build' -type d -prune -exec rm -rf '{}' +
find . -name '.gradle' -type d -prune -exec rm -rf '{}' +

Which thinned the Developer directory from ~90GB down to ~80MB!

I can easily zip up that directory and drop in Cloud Storage backup now :cheers:

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42950501/delete-node-modules-folder-recursively-from-a-specified-path-using-command-line