Exclude documents

[dg27]

I've used Retrospect Professional for many years but always backed up my entire boot drive (Win XP Home) on two machines. I would now like to only back up the OS and settings (not the documents). I have other ways of backing up the docs and want to keep my backup sets as small as possible. Including the docs means I wind up with gigantic backup sets. Is there any way of easily doing this? The "selectors" options made my head spin and I wasn't sure whether when I created a script first and applied 'selectors,' whether those applied to the scripts I had already created. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you.

Edited August 19, 2010 by Guest

[Daniels]

You can actually don this on the client side or use the following exception:

 

Exclude if any are true:

 

folder/file name contains "my documents" including enclosing folders.

 

You then save the rule and use it in the scripts.

[dg27]

Thanks for the reply--I'll try this. I assume I should replace "My" in "My Documents" with the users name if I changed it on the folder, right? (I always change that.)

[Daniels]

Yes and also make sure to include any other "My" folders.

[dg27]

Thanks, I will.

[rhwalker]

Understand that, by Retrospect's design, the filesystem recursive tree walk is done first, with the list of files being supplied to the filter (selector). So, for example, if you crafted the selector to only choose a single directory for backup, every file in every directory on the entire volume would be examined as a candidate, with just the chosen files for backup being backed up.

 

The only way to avoid scanning the entire volume is to define Retrospect "subvolumes", and then only that "subvolume" will be examined.

 

It's non-intuitive to new users, who expect only the chosen directories to be scanned. That's the way the program is designed.

 

Russ

[dg27]

Thanks for explaining, that Russ. I may have to post again after the backup that's running right no completes so I can have a look at the script and compare to what you said. Like I said earlier, I have non-Retrospect solutions for backing up my actual document files, which is what makes this trickier.