Exclude files/dirs from backup

Is there a way to exclude certain files and/or directories from the backup?

Suppose a site has a photo gallery with hundreds of megabytes of image files, or an archive of zip files. These usually can't be compressed much (if at all), so the resulting backup file is huge.

This may cause the account to go over the quota (or maybe DA just won't allow the backup to finish), and it will certainly make downloading the archive a real pain.

As far as I could see in the docs and the demo panel (I don't use DA *yet*, I will very soon), there's no setting for file/dir exclusions.

I guess advanced users can log in with SSH and run backup from the command line (if SSH is enabled). But I think most web hosts don't really want users to do that...

I think exclusions are important for backups. If this is implemented I suggest it be a part of a "backup set" feature: A user can define all the settings for a backup and save them as a set for subsequent backups, with the option to store several such sets, eg. for daily, weekly, monthly backups, etc.

EZ.

PS - I'm not a web host, just a modest reseller (a happy customer of Dixiesys!), so I'd be interested to know what others do to backup a site with a big image gallery or an archive full of zip files.

Hello,

We don't have anything like that. You can just create a backup, and not include the domain files in the backup. Then you can create a simple sh script to make a tar.gz file and add a cron job to run that script however often you want.

John

John,

Yes it's possible to create custom backups with scripts and cron, but that requires familiarity and experienxe with Linux. The whole point of a CP is to let non-expert users manage their web sites, and backup is an important part of running a site.

I understand that requests from hosts seem more important than requests from end users, but I still hope that you will add file/dir exclusions to future versions of DirectAdmin.

Regards,

EZ.

How about Daily, Weekly and Monthly backups aswell, with each form of backup in its own directory as above, and then dated within the directory so you know the exact date it was created? A little like what cpanel does, as at the moment you can do backups whenever you wish but they will goto the same directory overwriting the previous backups.

xcensus,

Our own implementations of serverwide backup resolve this problem by running cron jobs to rename directories after the backups are made into them.

Jeff