01-11-2021 07:40 PM
I've been a user of System Recovery for MANY years but I have this love / hate relationship with it.
I had a multi-year maintenance agreement, let it lapse (on purpose), a few years later, I'm back, but again considering bailing.
I love the UI and how easy it is to manage my backups. However, the big frustration that I keep running into is the inability to exclude files and / or directories from my image backups.
I have a few significantly large files that get backed up via other means so I really don't need duplicated effort and space used by System Recovery. But there STILL is no way way to exclude files from my image backups.
So, here I am once again pleading and asking; are there any plans to finally implement such a capability?
I've used at least 3 other disk imaging programs with this capability, but as noted, I really like other aspects of System Recovery.
Any comments, or at least a sliver of hope that this might at least be a feature under consideration? :)
01-11-2021 08:10 PM
As far as I know, we already have a workaround to exclude files or filders from VSR image backups. See the below article and post. It is a way to add a registry key to exclude files or folders from VSS snapshots.
Solution section in https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/article.100047706
and
my reply in "https://vox.veritas.com/t5/System-Recovery/VSR-18-Folder-Backup-With-Exclusions/m-p/874129"
In my reply in VOX, I wrote a caution like below. The registry may also work for the other backup software using VSS snapshots. That is, even if you try to back up a file or folder by the other backup software after adding the registry, the file may be also excluded from the backups. Then, please remove the registry before the backups by software, and add it before backups by VSR.
Caution: If you use this key, the files in D:\test01\02\*.* and subfolders will be excluded even if backed up by any backup sofotware (Not only System Recovery but also Windows backup or 3rd party backup software).
Thanks,
01-12-2021 12:46 PM
I appreciate the thought, but recall how I mentioned that I have other means for backing up the files I wanted to exclude from System Recovery? Modifying the registry to exclude those files breaks my other backups!
Still, I appreciate the thought, but it's really not a substitute for putting it in the product.
01-12-2021 04:05 PM
Does anyone agree with this request from Hans05 ? I would like to know how much demand there is.
01-13-2021 11:17 PM
I totally agree and would LOVE to have this feature implementet!
01-14-2021 12:07 AM - edited 01-14-2021 12:07 AM
I shared your voices to product managers and Engineering team.
Thanks,
01-14-2021 09:48 AM
Very much appreciated!
01-14-2021 04:19 PM
Thank you for providing your ideas.
01-14-2021 05:26 PM
As a side note, for drives other than the OS drive, I had considered using the "File and folder" backup option rather than a whole disk image.
However, from the System recovery User Guide, we have this statement:
Note: The file and folder backup is intended for less than 10,000 files. If the data
to be backed up exceeds this amount, Veritas strongly recommends to use the
drive-based backup.
I have one single folder which itself contains over 135,000 files and over 79,000 folders so that's simply not going to work.
Simply thought I'd mention this in case anyone thought that might be an appropriate workaraound.