Universal excluding of directories from backups and disk quota

1 post / 0 new
#1 Thu, 08/19/2010 - 08:52
rrhode

Universal excluding of directories from backups and disk quota

Hi there,

I can't find anything anywhere on how to exclude directories in a universal way.

What I am trying to do is to avoid the huge backup downloads each week when my full backup runs.

Some sites are approaching their disk quota, and when one site went over quota it was causing the backup to freeze because the sql database wouldn't write due to the virtual server being over quota. It was odd, I couldn't do anything with the database at all but as soon as I increased the servers quota I had to repair a table in the database and everything was fine again. These backups would remain running in the background frozen trying to backup this database table until the Maximum concurrent backups were reached. Just sitting there idle frozen on backing up the database for that particular virtual server that it wouldn't backup any servers. I had to go and kill the processes after fixing the database to get backups to run properly again. I don't know if thats a bug or what.

So what I wanted to do was give users an option to place certain files into a folder that won't be backed up, thus avoiding the huge backups, saving bandwidth and disk space. Such as videos or something that they don't need backed up. I know a user could go in and exclude directories themselves but they don't. Maybe there is some way to do this but I can't find it.

If I could make a folder named /home/username/dontbackup or optionally /home/username/public_html/dontbackup or whatever and in the Universal Exclude Directories option I could just enter the word dontbackup and it would then not backup any directories with that name on all virtual servers. Or maybe could use /home/${username}/dontbackup or whatever. Then I could put in the /etc/skel folder the dontbackup folder so its created automatically upon virtual server creation.

Does this make any sense?

This also gives me another thought. Since they are not backing up the huge files, maybe I could have a similar universal option to bypass the disk quota on certain folders as well. Since there is ample disk space actually available and I simply don't want to have to download backups all day and night of files that don't need backed up in the first place.

Do these things already exist and I am just not seeing them some place?

Thanks =)

Ryan