Proper way to exclude vmdk's from a backup?

[squebel]

When needing to exclude a specific vmdk from a vm, it seems like you have to say what to INCLUDE and not what to EXCLUDE; this seems backwards to me. If we set up a job to backup only 0:0 and 0:1 so that 0:2 isn't backed up, what happens if someone adds a new disk to the vm later down the road? What config can we make on the job that would ensure that the future disk(s) would be protected automatcially while still excluding the disk we don't want to be backed up?

[soncscy]

Heya squebel,

Why not just include the first 9 SCSI elements then for the relevant VMs, exclude the desired disks? Or first N elements where N is the number of disks your most disk-ful VM has or some reasonable number? Basically just by default include a bunch of scsi elements since including non-existent elements for a VM doesn't seem to have much of an issue. With Poweshell it's pretty easy to set this for newly added VMs, but I get that's some work and maybe not feasible

I'd run a few tests with a non-primary backup just to make sure, but I tested on a lab machine quick and seems the extra includes don't do anything naughty for non-existent disks.

Of course, this means you need to be sure that you're monitoring which disks do get added as you might have some unexpected backups sometimes, but seems to work!

[squebel]

I guess if that's the only way to do it, we can try that. I don't get the concept of setting exclusions by having to set inclusions. Why would VBR not have the concept of "do all of it besides X" ?

[Mildur]

Since V11, this is possible for agents. Include all except „that disk“.
Hopefully it will come for vms too.