Unexpected Backup Behavior After Adding Exclude Pattern

Support
#1

Hey everyone,

I’m facing a very confusing issue with my Unraid appdata backup to OneDrive, and I’m hoping someone here might have some insights.

Background:
For a long time, I’ve been backing up my Unraid’s /mnt/user/appdata directory (approx 550GB) to my OneDrive account. This setup has been working perfectly for ages, staying well within my OneDrive quota.

The Problem:
Yesterday, my OneDrive suddenly reported that it’s completely full. The weirdest part is that the only change I made recently was to modify the include/exclude patterns for the backup.

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My Configuration Change:

  • Previously: My pattern was simply +appdata/* (meaning everything under appdata was included).
  • Recently Changed To: -appdata/Recycle.Bin/* +appdata/* (I added an exclude pattern to prevent backing up temporary files or deleted items within specific appdata folders, hoping to reduce space).

What I’ve Checked:

  1. I’ve double-checked the source directory size on my Unraid server (/mnt/user/appdata), and it’s still around 550GB. Nothing has significantly grown there.
  2. I’ve looked into my OneDrive storage, and it’s indeed showing as full and it is filled by duplicacy directory.

Questions:

  • Has anyone experienced something similar when modifying include/exclude patterns, especially when adding an exclusion?
  • Could the new pattern have somehow triggered a full re-upload of existing files, creating duplicates or new versions on OneDrive that weren’t being handled before?
  • Is there a specific behavior with exclude patterns in certain backup tools (like rclone if that’s what’s being used) that I’m unaware of, which could cause this?
  • What else should I check on either the Unraid side or the OneDrive side?
#2

My understanding is that

  • if you have only include patterns: everything else is excluded
  • if you have both include and exclude patterns — everything else is included.

Maybe this is the difference — now you are including way more stuff implicitly.

It’s best to express what you want explicitly. In your case — add this to the end

-*
#3

That was a little frustrating, but thanks so much for clarifying everything! So, if I wanted to revert things back to how they were about three days ago, what would be the best approach?

#4

Delete the snapshot revision files for the recent backups that included too much data from the storage from under snapshots/name/ folder.
Then make sure no duplicacy is touching storage and run prune -a -exhaustive -exclusive. This will force remove all orphaned chunks.

The filters behavior is documented here: Include Exclude Patterns · gilbertchen/duplicacy Wiki · GitHub

If a match is not found, the path will be excluded if all patterns are include patterns, but included otherwise.