Excluding files with tilde character

No sense. The tilde character is the same as any other in that it has an ASCII value.
Which Acronis rep told you that *.~ would match anything other than it appears?

It won't, unless some specific programming has been included

For the record, here's what the Acronis chat representative actually typed in response to my question of what filenames *.~ matches:

tilde (~) sign is not a wildcard (like *). It is just a part of the filename. Depending on the system environment such files can be created by a number of applications and usually these are temp files. Specifying to exclude *.~ will exclude all files like 111.~, fff.doc~ , 24t43.~  etc.

If the file has tilde sign (~)  that means that it is a temp file. So for example , any file on your computer which is shown as filename.doc~ or filename.anyextension~  or ~abc.doc will be excluded from the backup if we select the *.~ option.

The tilde symbol is used to prefix hidden temporary files that are created when a document is opened in Windows. For example, when you open a Word document called "Document1.doc," a file called "~$cument1.doc" is created in the same directory. This file contains information about which user has the file open.  This file "~$cument1.doc" will be there only for the duration the related document file is open.

If an Acronis backup is running at the time "~$cument1.doc" or "Dcument1.doc~" file is present , the backup will exclude these files and will only take backup of the main " Dcument1.doc" file.

I'd like for an Acronis rep to post about why *.~ is the default exclusion in Acronis when most windows temp files match ~* instead.

I chatted with another Acronis rep, and after originally saying that *.~ does match ~file.ext he changed his story:

I don't understand how *.~ matches ~file.ext. Can you explain further why it matches ~file.ext and tell me whether *.~ matches any of these files: file.ext f~ile.ext file~.ext file.~ext file.ext~.
 ok, I will explain you.
 However, the files name which you have mentioned will not get exclude as the files names are not starting with ~.
  I regret to inform you that as wrong information was given to you by our side. I apologize for this inconvenience.
  *.~ will only exclude files whose names end with tilde (~). It would not exclude the file name whose name starts with tilde such as ~file.txt.
 It would not match any of the file names which you have provided to me.

But I still don't understand why the default is *.~ when most temp files match ~*

It is not considered polite or appropriate to paste individual support replies into the forum, please refrain from doing it.

Tom,

the '*' character is the anything mask, so *.exe would affect every file that has a dot exe file type, same as abcd.* would affect evey file that began with abcd and the file type doesn't matter, so;

abcd.tib
abcd.exe
abcd.cfg
abcd.txt

All would be affected by abcd.* so if abcd.* was an exclusion mask all the items in the above list would be excluded.

Single characters are masked by the ? symbol, the ? would replace one character only, so if you had a series of files with the name abcd1, abcd2, abcd3 you could mask off the number by

abcd?.tib

Which means any character that is in the fifth position (counting from the left) would be subject to the exclusion list, but abcd.tib wouldn't be affected.

If you want to exclude all temporary files that have a tilde at the beginning then you could do the following.

~.*

Don't forget that Windows also uses the $ sign for some install tracking files, though these files are often marked as system and are hidden, as they are sometimes required when installing updates etc and Windows needs a marker to know what to do with files on reboot.

Ridiculous - this is a SUPPORT forum. The more info the better.
Why do we need to "hide" what the Acronis support people have sent out ?
They are the experts - so tell us what they have said.

ls