For WordPress is there content in the database which I can safely ignore?

The only things you could clear out like this are transients, temporary options in the database. WP already does this on a cron job, and it’s unlikely to have a big impact. If you don’t mind data loss, revisions might reduce the database size, but that’s highly dependent on what you’ve been doing with the database.

A lot of the generated data WP uses is generated in realtime, e.g. post type data is registered on every page load as it’s cheap and fast. Cached data lives in memory and gets erased when the page has finished loading, or it persists in an object cache where it has a limited lifespan but doesn’t touch the database.

Eitherway, this is not the approach to take, and is a dead end not worth exploring. You’ll get a lot more out of zipping up your backups, or investigating incremental backups instead, but that’s a database question not a WP question.

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