Time machine creating files and directories at random places I'm gonna keep this short and simple. I have a ~/.vim folder and ~/dotfiles/.vim folder (the ~/dotfiles/.vim was copied to ~/.vim). Yesterday I noticed that I had several files with weird permissions in the ~/dotfiles/.vim folder, that was originally in the ~/.vim folder. These are two of them from ls -l:

-rw-r--r--@ 1 root           staff    0 Aug 14 20:22 .vimrc.swo
-rw-r--r--@ 1 root           staff    0 Aug 14 20:22 .vimrc.swp


From this

$ xattr -l .vimrc.swo
com.apple.backupdelta.creationMarker: yes
inodeForCreationOriginal: 10315637


and this

$ xattr -l .vimrc.swp
com.apple.backupdelta.creationMarker: yes
inodeForCreationOriginal: 10315632


it appears that time machine has created som sort of backups of some files in ~/.vim (the Vundle.vim directory is another example created at the exact same time). Is this normal behaviour? If not, what might be the cause and how can I fix it?
This seems harmless to me. If you want to clean things up, I would sudo tmutil disablelocal to clean up any local snapshots and then make a new test user and turn off automatic user log in.

Reboot and log in as test and make a clean backup interval without your user being logged in or any files open from the main ~ directory.

At that point, you can check for any odd files or delete them entirely (sudo -s from the test user to become root and able to delete things in your normal user folder).

Again, I don't think any of this will cause issues, but it might be nice to clean things up as described and have a known good backup interval where all files are properly closed and backed up once. Handling files that are always open or always changing is hard for backup tools - so excluding them by rule is also an option.

tmutil isexcluded

tmutil addexclusion file1 file2