Yeah, it’s not user friendly at all… ideally, duplicacy web shall do the right thing based on the user wants, and then convert that into language duplicacy CLI understands. Otherwise what’s the point of the gui, if user has to learn the filters language anyway.
I have sort of figured out the filters not because I really wanted another challenge
The filter file however is not the only way to exclude stuff. I’d say is the least desirable approach: metadata (information about what to exclude) lives separately from the data, so if you move data Around you have to also remember to update the metadata.
On macOS for example Time Machine uses extended attributes on a file or directory to allow developers to signal that this file or directory does not need to be backed up. This way metadata lives right with data and moves around with it. And who can know better what to exclude from a specific app than developers of said app.
Duplicacy and many other tools honor that flag, so on macOS my Duplicacy filter file is empty.
There is no such convention on windows.
There is however another way - Duplicacy can check for presence of a special hidden. .nobackup
file to skip the directory. I don’t remember if that’s the name of the file exactly of it can be overridden — but it may be a viable workaround worth looking into.
Then you would remove your filters file and just drop that file into folded you want excluded. It seems to be more sane and easier to manage approach, maybe it is worth looking into.
Edit:
It looks like there is no way to specify it in the GUI, and modifying the preferences file won’t work because duplicacy web overwrites them.
@gchen, is there any way to make -no-backup-file work with webgui?