Hi - I thought I understood filters, but now I am not sure.
I want to include a separate volume in my main backup of root “/”. I read somewhere here that the way to do it is make a soft link of that volume to root, and it will be included - but it isn’t. I have a link, let’s call it “Drobo”, that links from /Volumes/Drobo to /Drobo. In my include patterns I have put
+Drobo/
It’s now the very first thing in the filters file, it used to be much lower down. I’ve also tried it like
+Drobo/* and some other variants.
It is never included.
Maybe I’m missing something, so I re-read the Filters/Include exclude patterns page here.
I got even more confused by this example:
For instance, the following pattern list doesn’t do what is intended, since the
foo
directory will be excluded so thefoo/bar
will never be visited:
+foo/bar/*
-*
Yet above this, it says:
When matching a path against a list of patterns, the path is compared with the part after “+” or “-”, one pattern at a time. Therefore, the order of the patterns is significant. If a match with an include pattern is found, the path is said to be included without further comparisons. If a match with an exclude pattern is found, the path is said to be excluded without further comparison.
So if it truly follows this logic, I am confused.
Say I had a file
foo/bar/bot.txt
If it compares top to bottom as the text says, it would first compare
foo/bar/bot.txt
to the pattern
foo/bar/*
This should match, right? So, accordingly, it stops comparison and never gets to
-*
and it should work as intended.
Now, I suspect that it is more complicated, because I wonder if you’re actually building an in-memory file-tree from the patterns in the file, and doing includes/excludes against the tree, not against the actual list of patterns? If that were the case, then your statement
For instance, the following pattern list doesn’t do what is intended, since the
foo
directory will be excluded so thefoo/bar
will never be visited:
Makes a lot more sense.
So, now I am wondering, what’s really going on with these, and most importantly, why can’t I get my external volume to be included?
Thanks!
Morgan