Filters Sanity Check

Support
#1

I’m not quite getting the filters concept and execution. I’ve read the how-to guide on this and some forum posts tagged with filters but not quite understanding. The filters file generated by the GUI (version 3.1.0) didn’t quite work, so I’m having to build my own.

I’d like to back up folders and their files, excluding some subfolders with their files from the set.
For example, I’d like to back up the Jack and Jill folders with all their subfolders and files, except for the music and videos subfolders.

# Jack files
+Jack/
-Jack/Music/*
-Jack/Videos/*
+Jack/*

# Jill files
+Jill/
-Jill/Music/*
-Jill/Videos/*
+Jill/*

But that doesn’t seem to do it. How should I rework this?
Thank you for any assistance.

#2

This looks correct. Are you initializing the repository in the same folder where folders Jack and Jill are located

Or maybe try removing * after music and videos — to exclude the whole folder, not just files under it.

#3

Yes, the Jack and Jill folders are in the top level. This instance is running as a docker in Unraid, so the /backuproot is mapped to /mnt/user/, and the folders above are /mnt/user/Jack and /mnt/user/Jill, respectively.
If I wanted to go on to exclude with some regular expressions, would those need to go before or after the above filters? Such as:

# exclude temporary file names
e:.*/?~.*$

# exclude common file types (case insensitive)
e:(?i)\.(bak|o|obj|old|tmp|dat)$

# exclude trash bin stuff
e:\.Trash/.*$

# exclude old firefox stuff
e:Old Firefox Data/.*$

# Jack files
+Jack/
-Jack/Music/
-Jack/Videos/
+Jack/*

# Jill files
+Jill/
-Jill/Music/
-Jill/Videos/
+Jill/*

Thank you for the assist.

#4

Each file (full path) is checked against each rule in the filters file. The first matching rule is applied and no further rules are checked.

Hence, what goes before and what after depends on what you are trying to achieve.

Your filters look correct to me, I don’t know what would that not work — unless you have some rules before them that match earlier.