Backup Exclusion Files Best Practices

[bsheridan85]

Hey everyone,

Cutting to the chase, I need some assistance on figuring out what the best practices are for excluding file types in the effort to minimize backup time. I'm working in a virtualized environment and run daily backups on multiple VM's and would like to cut down the time it takes for these backups to occur.

One way I've heard of is excluding file types ie pagefiles, that are not essential files. Any other recommendations and/or other misc. file types that are not mission critical that I can exclude during a backup schedule?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Regards,

B

[Support-mcc]

There is two ways you could do this.  1 is to exclude what you don't need.  Can be a pain, since sometimes you don't know what you don't need.

or

2nd, just tag the files you need.  APP & user data and so forth.

Is there a magic "Best Pratice document"  I wish!!

[pkh]

I presume you are backing up your VM's as if they are physical machines.  If you are backing up the entire VHD/vmdk, then there is no way to exclude any file.

That said, BE automatically exclude certain files, like pagefiles and databases.

The danger about manually excluding files is that you never know when you are going to need that file.