Our current local backup solution does an incremental backup every day and then a full backup on Fridays. It does NOT do a mirror backup, so essentially files are never deleted from the backup device. Because I only have one backup set, this is the easiest and least space-hogging way to make sure files aren't lost or overwritten or deleted on the backup drives. The question is this, within the user profile folder there are many folders that could potentially be excluded. It seems natural to just 'backup the user folder', but this includes all manner of Internet cache files, temp folders, cookies, history, and more.
Temporary files; Specific application data that an app may flag for Time Machine to not back up; This applies to all versions of Mac OS X which have Time Machine. Source: Kevin M. Apple Training Series: Mac OS X Support Essentials v10.6. Peachpit Press. Filters are available to exclude temporary data from your backups and run predefined backup tasks such as My Documents, My Pictures, Outlook Express etc. Read on to find out more about FBackup. The main interface has N ew, Open, Views, Copy, Properties, Delete, Backup, Restore, Cancel and Refresh buttons at the top.
I'm wondering if anybody has created a list or has a set of folders they exclude from user profile backups to prevent backing up thousands of cache and temp files. Remember, our backups don't mirror, which basically means that at the time of backup, your backup drive will contain every temp file you ever had! Just recently I did a mirror backup as a form of maintenance. My workstation took ALL DAY to sync the files and delete everything off the backup drive. Other less crowded workstations took a number of hours to mirror. But right away I'm in the same boat, it's backing up temp and cache files again, of course.
So, I've found these folders to exclude from within user profiles, they are all in user AppData. Local Microsoft Windows History Local Microsoft Media Player Art Cache Local Microsoft Windows Temporary Internet Files Local Temp Roaming Microsoft Windows Cookies I had thought I could just exclude the whole AppData folder but of course, this may include lots of good data, such as our Thunderbird profiles, so that's out. I thought about using a filter of some sort, but not everything is called 'temp' or 'cache' so that's out.
And lastly, I'm trying to avoid needing to add this huge list of excludes to every single computer in here. I also thought maybe I could just run a Windows cleaner like Crapcleaner before every backup, but I think that would annoy people to lose Internet cache and history every day. I'm hoping there is some secret technique that lets me exclude two or three things and be done.
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I don't know, I'm curious how you handle backups, do you use incremental, differential, mirror everything, multiple backup sets, or have lists of excluded folders from user profiles? Incidentally, it makes me wonder if there is a global way to tell Windows to 'store all user data here' and then 'store all the nonsense data there' for just this reason, to give me one single folder with all the good stuff to backup.). MadEagle wrote: (P.S. Incidentally, it makes me wonder if there is a global way to tell Windows to 'store all user data here' and then 'store all the nonsense data there' for just this reason, to give me one single folder with all the good stuff to backup.) You can specify a location for Documents, Music, Pictures, Desktop, Favorites, Videos, Downloads, Links, Saved Games, and Searches. Essentially the user data you're after.
There are a few other bits hiding in AppData, but even the newer versions of Office stick Outlook data in Documents Outlook Files. It should be a simple matter to redirect these folders to, say, C: UserData and backup from there. No server here. Bryce, that makes sense, except for nearly every 3rd party app which stores it's data in the AppData folder somewhere. Like Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird profiles come to mind. Some data may be in Roaming, some in Local, etc. I wish Windows used some kind of universal cache/temp location and all programs had to use it.
Similar to Linux I guess. I think right now the best bet is to keep excluding all the found temp/cache folders because I don't want to lose any important program data.
I'm up to 11 locations excluded at this point. The biggest problem is that I have to go to each computer and set up every exclusion one by one!