Ignoring OS X Folders (/System/, /Library/, etc.)

[cabal95]

I am trying to setup a Mac OS X backup server to backup a number of clients. Here is my setup:

Retrospect 5 Server for Mac OS X on 10.2.4

20+ Mac OS X 10.1.x and 10.2.x clients

10+ Mac OS 9 clients

4 Microsoft Windows clients (1 98, 1 2000 Pro, 2 NT 4 servers)

 

I am backing up to an Autopak 1x7, which has 7 80GB cartridges for a total of 560GB uncompressed storage.

Our network has a total of 1.2 Terabytes of uncompressed data. at an average speed of 120MB/minute it would take a total of 8.7 days to backup our network. Without verification. Needless to say we need a way to slim that down a bit.

 

What I want to do is setup a selector filter that lets me ignore certain folders. Example:

/System/

/Library/

/private/

/usr/

/sbin/

/bin/

/etc/

/tmp/

 

Those are the main ones. However, if I use the path name filter (which would make sense for this application) and tell it to ignore files which do not start with /System/, it does not work. The reason is that if prepends the volume name to the path, example volume is named "theopholus" so the path becomes:

theopholus/System/

theopholus/Library/

 

and so on. This would not be a problem, except that I do not want to create 40+ backups scripts, one for each computer on the network. Not to mention the computers with multiple volumes.

 

If anybody has a suggestion for how I can circumvent this, please let me know. I am currently doing filters like:

path name contains /System/ AND does not contain /Users/ AND does not contain /Applications/

but that still sometimes matches files I do not want, more specifically things like /Library/ or /private/ tend to accidently match.

 

Now, my recommendation to Dantz:

There would be a beautiful option in Special Folders called "Boot Volume". If I could ignore boot volumes it would be great! Second, I would like to be able to create a filter like this:

Parent folder is Volume Root AND Folder name matches Library

 

The first option would just be great for setting up scripts like this. (This script would be come much easier if I could just make it only match if it was the boot volume)

The second option (namely look at Parent folder) would let us make sure that what we want to match is at the root level and not somewhere else. Currently I can match _filenames_ at the root level, but not folder names.

 

Oh, and regular expressions would be a beautiful thing. ;-)

 

Daniel