Exclude a folder from backup operation

[Ctrl/Alt/Del]

I mirrored a certain section of a Windows 7 help site, the tutorial section, and it came out to be a 7GB file. I have it all in one folder and I enjoy having the folder on my computer for offline viewing but, I don't want to back it up.

I have my hard drive partitioned into a few different volumes. For example:

A: is for technical files and reference material and things like that.

B: is for music and videos, etc...

I regularly backup all of A drive and all of B drive to flash drives. I have the 7GB folder nested within A: drive in a folder called technical.

If I back up A:, as normal, it will try to include the 7GB folder. How can I exclude this one particular folder from a backup?

Thanks.

[acheton]

Good suggestion, I think it would be helpful to have an exclusion list which applies to backup operations.

[admin]

One could do sth similar to the Custom Copy Blacklist, but with a list of sources instead of targets.

Or use scripting backupto and add a parameter "exclude" or so.

But it's currently not so high on my list.

[acheton]

But it's currently not so high on my list.

Fair enough

[RalphM]

Sorry to revive this thread after 11 years.

Still not high enough on the list?

[admin]

Not that high. Can you give a convincing example of its utmost importance?

[RalphM]

If I backup my "C:\Data" directory to my NAS, it includes a subdirectory which is a symbolic link to a directory already stored on the NAS.
I moved my iPhone iTunes backups to the NAS a while ago because they used up way too much space on the laptop and replaced the directory on the laptop with a symlink to the NAS, so iTunes still behaves as normal.

So in the above described backup, I backup several GB of data (10000's of small files) to my NAS where they already exist just in a different location.

By being able to exclude such symlink folder I could avoid duplicating that data and speed up the backup significantly.

[admin]

Are you aware of the filter parameter in backupto and sync?

Code: Select all

backupto [location], [source], [on_collision], [preserve_dates], [create_log], [pop_stats], [skip_junctions], [verify], [show_progress], [filter]
sync source, target, [copy_items], [on_collision], [delete_items], [switches], [logfile], [filter]

[RalphM]

No, I wasn't until now.
I'll look into it and try to solve my problem that way.

Thanks for the hint.