Hi James

I am not sure if this question has been answered elsewhere and I apologise for asking if it has.

If I select for backup an entire volume containing the OS and user directories, what, if any, files or folders are excluded by default? I ask this because applications such as SuperDuper automatically omit certain items, such as the Volumes folder.

Thanks

Adrian

Adrian Chapman wrote:what, if any, files or folders are excluded by default?

Good question.

As of 1.2.0(50), the list of items the get automatically excluded from a capture are:

The action's archive [1]

/tmp directory

/var/temp directory

VM swap directory [2]

/.vol directory

/.hotfiles.btree directory

/.fseventsd directory

/.dbfseventsd directory

/.MobileBackups directory [3]

/.DocumentRevisions-* directory [4]

Mountpoints (i.e. other volumes) [5]

Named pipes (FIFOs)

Character special files (character generators)

Block special files (device files)

Sockets (communication ports)

Whiteout files

For every user's home folder:

~/.TemporaryItems directory

~/.vol directory

~/.fseventsd directory

~/.dbfseventsd directory

In addition, the capture action may specify other items to be filtered out and has canned filters for the various Trash and Cache folders.

[1] You can't capture an archive to itself.

[2] The location of the VM swap is determined by examining the dynamic pager daemon and is normally at /var/vm. If you've customized your VM swap location, you may need to set the QRVMSwapStorePath, see advanced setting.

[3] Only when running Lion (OS X 10.7) or later

[4] Only when running an OS earlier than Lion. Only Lion can understand the files in this directory; to earlier operating systems, these files are unreadable.

[5] Most of the items in the /Volumes directory are mount points. So the /Volumes directory itself gets captured, but rarely anything inside it. Similarly for the /dev folder, which contains mostly block and character special files.

Thanks James

This is exactly what I hoped to hear from you.

Adrian