Excluding folders so that they are not scanned

[fact0r]

Hi,

 

I'm using Retrospect 6.0 server on Mac OS 10.3. This server backs up about 100 clients. My question relates to efficiently backing up data on other Mac OS X clients.

 

I want to backup everything except anything inside the directories:

/Applications

/Applications (Mac OS 9)

/System

/System Folder

 

By excluding these directories we are excluding a very large percentage of the files on the system while having a good shot at picking up all data on the system. I currently exclude these using server side "Selectors". The problem with these is that the whole client drive is scanned before these "Selector" rules are applied - at huge time cost.

 

Is there another way to exclude whole directories and contents (eg in a way like the /etc/retroclient.excludes file in linux)?

 

Or is Dantz going to fix this up in the next version. ... I'm sure this isn't a very strange sort of request from large academic organisations trying to suck down a good amount of data as quickly as possible while kind of just hoping that we've got enough.

 

... my other dubious plan if Dantz doesn't have a solution is to run the retrospect client service in some sort of jail that prevents it from seeing the folders that I definitely want excluded.

 

Hope someone can help.

[queball]

You would have to define subvolumes on the client of the folders you want to backup and then just back those subvolumes up either individually or as a group. There are some settings you can play with after creating the subvolume definitions to select only certain ones by default when you go into the properties of the client.

 

There is no way to get the snapshot mechanism to skip files even if they are not being backed up. It's all or nothing when it comes to the snapshot. They have not changed this for any of the many versions they have made so far, I doubt there are any plans to change the behavior unless they plan to completely rewrite the whole program from scratch.

 

On a side note. Have you noticed how incredibly rare it is for a software developer to start from scratch these days. It used to be more common, even for large products, but now things seem to have grown too large to consider this. The last big thing I saw redeveloped was maybe Adobe Pagemaker -> Adobe Indesign or MacOS X (Which was based on Next technology so not even a complete rewite when you thik about it.)