Wildcards when Excluding Folder

I've not tried adding file exclusions after a full backup has been made, but you might get a better result if you make it a global exclusion rather than a task based one.

I have had TI 2009 and 2010 ignore task based instructions and only recognise the global one.

The global one is off of Tools & Utilities\Options

The other option would be to manually add the exclusions to the script file, but that would be fraught with danger.

I did add the exclusion to the global set. I also checked the exclusions associated with the specific backup and the exclusions were listed there too.

So I'm still wondering about the form of the exclusion when using wildcards.

Maybe today I will try entering the entire pathname and see if that works.

--Larry

I did another incremental with the full pathname specified. ATI still included the folder (and contents) in the backup.
Unless I'm doing something wrong (who said that?) it seems to me that ATI ignores exclusions added after the base backup is made.

I'll keep experimenting. Maybe I'll include a *.* after the folder name like:
C:\Users\User\AppData\........\XX.YY.ZZ\Junk\*.*

--Larry

I think this whole issue is actually an error on my part. What I'm trying to exclude from the ATI backups are Thunderbird mail folders. For example, Junk, Sent, Trash. They are represented as folders in Thunderbird but, of course, they are not stored as Windows folders. Each Thunderbird folder is just a file in which Thunderbird puts all the email messages. And I knew that! (Actually, each Thunderbird folder is stored as two files. E.G. Junk and Junk.msf)

So, I should be excluding files with the appropriate names. For example,

C:\Users\User\AppData\........\XX.YY.ZZ\Junk.*

I will do another set of experiments tomorrow and report back.

--Larry

My previous post even gets it wrong. The proper form to get files Junk and Junk.msf would be Junk*, not Junk.*

So I did the experiment again today using Junk* at the end of the full pathname and it looks to me that Junk and Junk.msf were included in today's incremental. I'm judging by looking at both the mod date of the file and the size of the file listed when I explore the latest incremental.

I guess the next experiment is to do another base backup and see what it contains.

--Larry

I think, you'll find (or should that be 'hope'?) that creating a new base with the exclusion(s) will solve your problem.

You shouldn't have to do full paths, just the file names plus the type if applicable.

It is advisable to actually make a complete new task or set of tasks as editing a task doesn't always produce the result you hope for. ;)

I need to define a new backup anyway since I did not include the 100MB System Reserved partition.

I did two One-Click backups when the system was real new. So now I need to research the Acronis Secure Zone (asz) to see if it should (or can) be included too. Backups of backups has never been something I felt I needed to do but if you have to get a new system disk, the backup you recover from really needs to have everything. That would imply that the asz should be included in system backups. Hmmmm.......

--Larry

The SZ is not normally backed up and it's not generally recommended to do so. If you do back it up, you'll also be backing up all the images in the SZ (your backups will be very large). Also, you wouldn't want to backup to the SZ and backup the SZ at the same time.

I defined a new backup today using a different disk as the target. I set up the file exclusions as I had in the earlier backups. I also created a test file called temptest.del in one of my folders. I added the exclusion *test.del
So my exclusion list included
*test.del
*mail.comcast.net\Junk*
It turns out that file temptest.del was not included in the backup (Good!).
But the files Junk and Junk.msf were both included (Bad) from folder C:\Users\...\mail.comcast.net\
There is something I do not understand about this exclusion stuff with wildcards. Or maybe a problem in ATI?

My next test will be to create another new backup definition and include the entire pathnames to the files I want to exclude. No wildcards.
I will also create a test folder with a bunch of test files in it and will try excluding the entire folder.

I guess I'm lucky that a full backup doesn't take very long because the size is on the order of 11GB. Otherwise these experiments would be way too time consuming. Well, actually, they are pretty time consuming but I'd really like to exclude some files and folders from the backups!
And if I can get exclusions to work, I'll probably get another copy of ATI to replace an old Norton Ghost I've been using on a WinXP system.

--Larry

Try the 'junk' test without naming a folder or path.

I think having a URL style folder name might confuse TI, however, just excluding all instances of junk* should work.

More experiments have been done and I'm getting really frustrated...

It was suggested that I just enter "Junk" as what to exclude but Junk is just one example file name that I want to exclude and just saying "Junk" would exclude the same filename from other paths or folders. So I must be more explicit.

I found that specifying the pathname

C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\ax9hk0sm.default\Mail\*\Junk worked.
(That's the full pathname with the folder name "mail.comcast.net" replaced with with "*".)

whereas

C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\ax9hk0sm.default\*\Junk did NOT work. I can't see why it wouldn't work.

Also, the form
*\ax9hk0sm.default\*\Junk did NOT work. I didn't try *\ax9hk0sm.default\Mail\*\Junk

I also created a testfolder to see if I could exclude it. The form

*\larry's files and info\testfolder\ didn't work and backed up the folder and its contents.

And the full pathname
C:\Users\User\My Documents\larry's files and info\testfolder\ didn't work and backed up the folder and contents.
Is it possible that pathname is case sensitive? In the above example the exact name is .....\Larry's Files and Info\testfolder\

Whenever I changed the list of things to exclude, I also created an entirely new backup (and deleted the old one via ATI) rather than editing an existing backup. After deleting a backup with ATI, I used Windows Explorer to verify that the backup files were gone.

--Larry

More experiments and now I can get my exclusions to work. I don't have a clue when wildcards will work or not. That seems to be an issue that someone should address. For example, my previous post showed two forms for the file Junk and both should have worked as far as I'm concerned but only one of them does work. So I'm using what I've experimentally determined to work.

I solved the issue with excluding a folder. In the previous post I said that the full pathname did not work.
It looked like

C:\Users\User\My Documents\larry's files and info\testfolder\ <--Does not work.

The problem is that "My Documents" doesn't seem to be valid in pathnames. It needs to be "Documents". And, of course, pathnames are not case sensitive. But of course Win7 shows "My Documents" as part of the path leading to the child folders. What a crock!

So C:\Users\User\Documents\larry's files and info\testfolder\ works fine.

I think I'm done messing with this. On to other issues with ATI that are bugging me -- but new topics will be used for them.

--Larry

I have done some tests on an installed version of Acronis True Image Home 2010 v13.0.0.7046 in WinXP Pro SP3. I used "Disk and Partition Backup" to backup my C: partition. I tried to exclude C:\WINDOWS directory with the following exclusions:

C:\WINDOWS\*.*\ --> C:\WINDOWS present as are the files in it's root. Subfolders also present including the files inside them
C:\WINDOWS\*.* --> C:\WINDOWS present including it's subfolders and their files. Files in root of C:\WINDOWS not present (except dotless ones)
C:\WINDOWS\*\ --> C:\WINDOWS present including the files in it's root. Subfolders not present.
C:\WINDOWS\* --> C:\WINDOWS not present
C:\WINDOWS\ --> C:\WINDOWS not present
C:\WINDOWS --> C:\WINDOWS not present

So if you want to keep the directory but just make it empty, you could add two exclusion rules, for example:
C:\WINDOWS\*.*
C:\WINDOWS\*\
This would keep the folder C:\WINDOWS present in the *.tib file but it would be empty (except any dotless files would still be in it's root). Acronis True Image Home 2010 obviously can't handle dotless files if using wildcards.

I will be using this to exclude all the files and folders under D:\Programs\uTorrent\downloads\ without deleting the "downloads" folder itself. :-)