Exclude folders from backup

[Karbust]

Hello,

When using File level backup, is it possible to exclude folders with wildcards from backups?

For example, I want to exclude every folder that is named "node_modules", ".git" and ".vs". Is that possible?

Thank you

[rovshan.pashayev]

Hello Antonio,

Here are available filter examples which you can use: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

[Karbust]

Hello,

I have seen that page, unfortunately it doesn't work for many folders, would need to specify one by one, for example:

• D:\Projects\project1\node_modules
• D:\Projects\project2\node_modules
• etc

Would be really good to not backup any folder that matches a string, for example, my Backblaze rules:

Code: Select all

<excludefname_rule bzmergeblock="001" plat="win" osVers="*"  ruleIsOptional="t" skipFirstCharThenStartsWith="*" contains_1="\node_modules\" contains_2="*" doesNotContain="*" endsWith="*" hasFileExtension="*" />
<excludefname_rule bzmergeblock="001" plat="win" osVers="*"  ruleIsOptional="t" skipFirstCharThenStartsWith="*" contains_1="\.vs\" contains_2="*" doesNotContain="*" endsWith="*" hasFileExtension="*" />
<excludefname_rule bzmergeblock="001" plat="win" osVers="*"  ruleIsOptional="t" skipFirstCharThenStartsWith="*" contains_1="\.git\" contains_2="*" doesNotContain="*" endsWith="*" hasFileExtension="*" />

Any folder called node_modules, .vs or .git is not backed up, doesn't matter it's path.

Quoting a NOTE from the page you sent:

Note that you cannot use a wildcard in the middle of the path. For example, specifying E:\*\2023 will cause an error during backup. To recursively exclude files from specific subfolders of the selected root folder, you can use the standard OS mechanism for exclusions.

From: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... n-the-path

Something like this on Veeam would make a huge differene.

Thank you

[rovshan.pashayev]

Hello Antonio,

Thank you for the feature enhancement suggestion.
We have acknowledged it and will conduct an investigation into its potential implementation.

[Karbust]

Thank you for the feedback!

Hope it is implemented!

[JGM2023]

+1 Please, We requested this a long time ago through our Enterprise account manager. Wildcards would be a huge benefit.

[mge]

+1

Our situation is Linux managed Agent and we have this folder structure for example with two projects (but we have many more project-folders):
/sharedev/projects/projectA/v10/data/install
/sharedev/projects/projectA/v10/data/test
/sharedev/projects/projectA/v10/data/prod
/sharedev/projects/projectA/v11/data/install
/sharedev/projects/projectA/v11/data/test
/sharedev/projects/projectA/v11/data/prod
/sharedev/projects/projectA/v12/data/install
/sharedev/projects/projectA/v12/data/test
/sharedev/projects/projectA/v12/data/prod

/sharedev/projects/projectB/v10/data/install
/sharedev/projects/projectB/v10/data/test
/sharedev/projects/projectB/v10/data/prod
/sharedev/projects/projectB/v11/data/install
/sharedev/projects/projectB/v11/data/test
/sharedev/projects/projectB/v11/data/prod
/sharedev/projects/projectB/v12/data/install
/sharedev/projects/projectB/v12/data/test
/sharedev/projects/projectB/v12/data/prod

We need to exclude from backup all "test"-folders recursively from each project. We have to exclude all the test-folder recursively, in each project-folder and each project can you multiple version-folders (and the customer-software generates new versions each time an update occurs - so it is not predictable for the backupteam) so we need many wildcards like this style:
/sharedev/projects/project*/v*/data/test/*

Information: at the moment it is not possible to change the test-folder with a mount/hardlink/etc.

Hopefully that will work too.

[TaylorB]

One thing to note is that to do exclusions by file/folder you have to do a file based backup instead of a volume based backup. We have seen some massive performance penalties by doing this. I have a 30TB server with lots of files and so I was thinking doing exclusions would save space and time. Instead it increased backup time by close to 100x. Volume level with CBT does an incremental in under an hour each night. File level with exclusions took nearly 4 days to do an incremental, even though it was less data. 98% of that time was just inventorying all the files looking for exclusions and changed files.

If you have a smaller server, the performance hit is not going to be as great, but neither is the space savings. Is it worth the hassle for saving 50GB on a large backup repository?