First, I believe this is already possible to do, I just haven’t come across the documentation yet.
I have an interesting idea regarding exclusion lists the basic idea is there are already many programs that clean out temp directories and misc useless files. An example of this is CCleaner.
There is also an addon to CCleaner, CCEnhancer which adds a ton more “temp/junk file location” resources for cleaning. I think it might be worth considering importing these locations as exclusions for UrBackup resources.
These junk file locations are already maintained by a community, and as far as I can understand it, the files these programs (CCleaner etc) would delete, are EXACTLY the same files we should not back up.
I started to create my own exclusion list but to be honest, it would be preferable to have an import / export functionality for this lists. I believe (correct me if I am wrong) the format for exclusion lists is doable as a CSV (with delimiter being a ; ), which I would like confirmation of.
I’m actually going to try and extract the junk file locations in a little bit, but can anyone think if there is any glaring reasons this would be a bad idea? Keep in mind before anyone else does this, these programs can wipe things that are important to backup (such as Bookmarks, etc) so the list would need to be customized carefully.
Currently, if you use the setup wizard on the client, it’ll auto-generate an exclusion list. See https://github.com/uroni/urbackup_frontend_wx/blob/dev/SetupWizard.cpp#L636 You can add some there and simply make pull requests. You’ll also see that it pulls exclusions from the registry (SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToBackup )
While it looks like a good idea at first sight, I would be reluctant to use it. I create backups for cases where files are gone, for whatever reason. One of these reasons might be a cleaner-application (like CCleaner) that accidently removes more files than it should be. If the files that the cleaner is going to remove are automatically excluded from the backup, I have no way to recover form these cleaner mistakes by using my backups.
Of course: if the option configurable then it’s totally up to the user to enable or disable it, but I would use it with caution.
You are right, it definitely needs to be done with some care. a.k.a Very sane defaults.
I did manage to find the list of temp file locations but have not yet managed to create a working / importable list yet.
Not enough time free and I’m a bit out of my element with data transformations ( the list of files on one source is actually a strangely formatted .ini file) I’m more of a sysadmin than a programmer.
