Check out this video on how to select data to back up.
The Backup > Selections page is where you specify which files and folders to backup and which to exclude. The screen capture below shows a typical view of this tab.
At the top of the window, you can select which day one is making selections for. Most users use the same backup selections every day, which is the default 'Everyday'; however, there are times when an end user only wants to backup certain files on certain days (for example a large database or Microsoft Exchange might only be backed up on weekends).
The backup client can end up using multiple selection sets for any given day, though when you select a day/set in the user interface you are editing only that set. So, as an example, if the day the backup has been launched on is a Saturday, then in the user interface you will be editing just those selections unique to that day, but the engine will do the following
- If selections have been specified for 'Saturday', then those selections will be used.
- If there are selections for 'Weekend', then those selections will be used as well.
- If there are selections for 'Everyday' then those selections will be used as well.
International customers can change the definition of Weekend (which defaults to Saturday & Sunday) and Weekdays (which defaults to Monday through Friday) using the INI keywords weekend and weekday.
Expanding the Computer section will show you the local volumes and VSS system components that are available for backup selections. If the backup scheduling service is running as an admin Windows user, you can also expand the Network section, which should show the networked computers that are broadcasting their shares over the network.
Expanding a drive or folder on the Selections page will show you the files and folders contained within the expanded folder.
In the example below there are several folders (directories) shown, these are shown with Type 'directory' and have a trailing backslash '\' after their name. For files, their Size is indicated and their Type corresponds to their file extension.
The selections tree has a few states or types to be aware of, clicking on the "info" button at the top of the component open a dialog which explains each in addition to selection sets.
Also under the Computer section is the Physical Drives section, which allows you to select the physical drives for offsite bare metal backups and restores. The bare metal backups will not require much free local disk space to process for backup, and will get good daily differential backups.
If you are running the scheduling service as "LocalSystem" you will see a popup message like the following when you try to browse the Network tree (you can read more about service users and permissions by clicking here).
If the scheduling service is running as a user with network privileges, you may browse the Network for shares:
You will also see "VSS System Components" underneath the Computer section. This is the area where you can view and select system components such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and System State.
You can also expand a VSS System Component, which will display the files associated with that component. For example, the "IIS Config Writer" backups up the following files. Detailed information on VSS System Components can be found here [Working with VSS Components].
Expert users may wish to manually edit the actual Selections File, instead of interactively making selections. When launched in expert mode, the page Backup > Text Selections will be present allowing one to edit the selections file using a text editor (or one may edit the Unicode .SEL text file using a simple editor such as notepad.exe). Additional information on the syntax of selection files can be found here [How to edit selection file syntax].