Using Label color for selection criteria

[Teonet]

Hi, I'm wondering if anyone can help with this. I have a several-times per day backup scrip set for certain "active projects" folders. Since these are animation projects, I typically only want to back up the project files and certain source materials, but not the gigabytes worth of usually test renders and preview files.

To make this work, I have those unneeded files in a separate folder say, called "renders" and then in my Retospect script, I have it set to "Always Exclude files with Enclosing Folder Matching... [label-color]". This does work fine in the actual backup. However, what happens, is when it scans before the backup, it still has to search every darn file, which in this case can be 10-20 thousand individual files (animation sequences or other data sequences), and the process of scanning can sometimes take half an hour, for an actual backup of just 5 minutes!

My question is: Is there any way to have it NOT scan the contents of a folder at all, if it's flagged to be excluded?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

[twickland]

The only way to avoid having Retrospect scan the entire volume would be to define a subvolume that contains only your desired files (or at least not so many undesired files).

 

In your case, this would require setting up your folders such that the "Renders" folders were not contained inside the "Active Projects" folders.

 

You would then define the desired subfolders in Configure> Volumes. To use the subfolders as sources, you could either enter them directly in your script, or you could list the client computers as sources and configure each client (Configure> Clients> Configure [yourclient]) to "back up selected volumes," highlighting just the desired subvolumes.

[Teonet]

Thanks for the workaround! I think I've resorted to this before in certain situations. Unfortunately, certain times, like with 3D Maya projects, the software creates and requires a whole group of associated folders (Scenes, SourceImages, RenderImages, ParticleData, etc.) to be together under one active Project folder. Trying to force things to render elsewhere creates problems... Oh well.