File exclusion is not supported

Hi Nick,

This warning appears when there are some volumes present on the backed up system which cannot be properly parsed by Acronis Backup which analyzes _all_ volumes in the system (not necessarily the ones which are backed up or ones which files/folders exclusions are specified for). For example ReFS volumes may cause this warning, or some specific volumes on SSD drives or some non-formatted volumes.

To properly investigate the case you should collect the system report from the backed up system from Acronis Backup interface (Help->Collect system report) and contact our support team for further assistance.

Thank you.

Hi,

We are running Acronis 11.7 too, and we have the same issue that after upgrading from 11.5 to 11.7 the file system exlcusion are not working anymore for the backup plans for our Redhat Linux systems.

We get the same error as Nick, i have attached the Error Messages.

We also have opened a support ticket but still no solution from Acronis. Our customer gets angry about this situation because the File exclusion is mandatory for our backup plans.

It seems that a lot of people claim about this, so do you know when Acronis will have a solution for this?

We are not using exotic Filesystems, a standard ext4 filesystem with Logical Volume Manager on it.

Attached the warning.

br

Michael

Michael,

Each such case is typically unique and depends on particular system setup specifics, therefore there is no common fix which will help everybody. In your case it makes sense to continue working with our support team in order to finish the investigation.

Also is it the warning which is the main concern, or is it that exclusions really do not work? I'm asking because the warning may be given only for _some_ volumes, while the exclusions in fact work properly on all the other volumes which you really need (for example if you have some raw unformatted LUN attached to the system - it may trigger the warning). Besides that it's quite unusual that you mentioned that exclusions stopped working after update from 11.5 to 11.7. Technically it's the same version/platform platform and the exclusions algorithms have not been changed in between, so further investigation is really required.

P.S. As mentioned in my previous reply, the only 100% reproducible bug which we were able to discover (fix pending for the next update for 11.7) is the following: the warning appears when backing up a Windows system with ReFS file system on some volume, e.g. exclusions from ReFS are known not to work.

Thank you.

In addition to my previous post:

I've discovered another scenario which may trigger the warning (it started to reproduce after update to 11.7): it may occur if you select Linux swap partition to be included into the backup along with other volumes. The solution would be to exclude the swap partition from the backup plan. This problem causes _only_ the warning in the log files, while the exclusions _do_ properly work despite the warning.

P.S. internal bug ID for reference is ABR-64978 - that's where warning caused by swap partition is pending to be removed

Hi,

Thanks for your quick response...

For the VMs we are using the file-exclusion we backup Disk1 + the Volumes + swap.

So do you mean we should not backup the swap only Disk1 + Volumes?

br

Michael

Michael Windsor wrote:

So do you mean we should not backup the swap only Disk1 + Volumes?

br

Michael

Yes, correct, OR you can ignore the warning - exclusions must still work for other volumes.

Note even if you don't back up swap partition contents, the information about the swap partition presence will be still recorded in the volume metadata included into the backup, so when/if it comes to recovery and you perform "Apply RAID/LVM structure" action from recovery wizard from bootable media environment - the volumes structure will be recreated on target machine disks using the same layout as it was in the original backed up machine.

Well, I know this is an OLD post (and I haven't logged in a while), but I came across this problem recently with 11.7 and it was after I made a small change in my settings. So, I basically reviewed my changes and found the "problem" and figured I would just document it for you all.

The problem is basically with FILE exclusions. I have not updated Acronis in AGES although I performed TWO major system updates on some Windows 10 machines. I basically use a VERY LONG exclusion list, because there is way too much junk on some machines and that is when I noticed a problem this past week.

Answer:

I had put a FILE exclusion for the Recycle Bin. Yep, very innocuous, but those bins get HUGE.

I had put $Recycle.* in my exclusion list and suddenly my backups all started failing.

I changed it to $Recycle* and suddenly all my backups started working.

So there you go. I use NO OTHER file exclusions in my settings and everything working 100%, so it could be a problem with using File Exclusion for certain objects. File exclusion of ANY kind. Or File Exclusion is acting wonky with the latest Window 10 Update. Who knows? But I will let Acronis Support or someone else perform QA tests to isolate the problem... :)

Either way, filter out FOLDERS\NAMES and stay away from File Filters for now. :)

I have been 100% Acronis and it has saved my butt hundreds of times, so I cannot put down their platform; but unfortunately they do not QA every variable or configuration when it can be something related to the Operating System. Kind of exptected, but hope this helps someone... :)

Good Luck...

CHANGED TO

:) Make sure you do not back up people's entertainment configurations, hahaha :)

DonChino, thank you for taking the time to document your solution! This will certainly help other users to properly configure the exclusion list.