Feature request: omit folders
Posted: Fri Sep 21, 2012 1:59 pm
I'd like to ask if it's possible to consider adding a feature to IFD/IFW which would allow you to specify particular folders to omit. There are 2 areas of a current typical Windows installation where the ability to omit certain paths would be a huge benefit:
(1) The user's data. Windows is built with the assumption that everything is stored on drive C including user data. Ideally you don't want this in an image backup for 2 reasons. Firstly data backup needs to be made much more often - in my case I do it at least once per day, sometimes many times. When you restore you want the latest data, very unlikely to be in the TBI image file. Data backup should be handled by other software and nowadays is likely to go to the internet. The second reason not to back up data is it may be many GB in size, creating very large image files which would mostly comprise data you don't want to restore.
(2) Cloud backup services often use a dedicated folder to contain material to back up to the internet. Sometimes of course these are not real locations on the hard drive, but sometimes they are. Again this is user data which doesn't really belong in a system image file, could be large in size and would only be up to date for a very short time after the image is taken. Cloud backup is easy and popular with many companies offering solutions and many people must be using it or considering it.
It's not just Windows. In Ubuntu Linux - Ubuntu One is a service offering free storage and it places the folder as a subdirectory of /home and this is not user configurable. Personally I keep /home in the system image because it contains configuration files. So this scenario is much like Windows in having user data mixed with system files. I suspect there are a good number of TB's users booting Linux systems as part of multiboot setups.
Currently I try to store user data on a different partition but Windows 7's design makes this very difficult. It wasn't so bad with XP.
Of course there would be techical difficulties in implementation and TB may say it would require too much of a rewrite of the software. However I am encouraged by 2 considerations. Currently there are IFD/IFW options to omit the Windows Page file and Hibernation file, and I see there is a utility (TBIVIEW) to extract individual files from an image (although I haven't used it). So I would expect some of the work to look into the file structure within an image may already have been done. To simplify implementation perhaps the program could look for a file with a particular name (example $TBI_OMITPATHS.txt) in the root of the partition being imaged, being a simple text file list of folders (including all subfolders) to omit, so no change required to the screen layouts.
I'm sure a lot of people would find this a very significant upgrade. I tried to look to see if such a feature has already been asked for here, but couldn't find any. No doubt the regular lurkers here will know.
(1) The user's data. Windows is built with the assumption that everything is stored on drive C including user data. Ideally you don't want this in an image backup for 2 reasons. Firstly data backup needs to be made much more often - in my case I do it at least once per day, sometimes many times. When you restore you want the latest data, very unlikely to be in the TBI image file. Data backup should be handled by other software and nowadays is likely to go to the internet. The second reason not to back up data is it may be many GB in size, creating very large image files which would mostly comprise data you don't want to restore.
(2) Cloud backup services often use a dedicated folder to contain material to back up to the internet. Sometimes of course these are not real locations on the hard drive, but sometimes they are. Again this is user data which doesn't really belong in a system image file, could be large in size and would only be up to date for a very short time after the image is taken. Cloud backup is easy and popular with many companies offering solutions and many people must be using it or considering it.
It's not just Windows. In Ubuntu Linux - Ubuntu One is a service offering free storage and it places the folder as a subdirectory of /home and this is not user configurable. Personally I keep /home in the system image because it contains configuration files. So this scenario is much like Windows in having user data mixed with system files. I suspect there are a good number of TB's users booting Linux systems as part of multiboot setups.
Currently I try to store user data on a different partition but Windows 7's design makes this very difficult. It wasn't so bad with XP.
Of course there would be techical difficulties in implementation and TB may say it would require too much of a rewrite of the software. However I am encouraged by 2 considerations. Currently there are IFD/IFW options to omit the Windows Page file and Hibernation file, and I see there is a utility (TBIVIEW) to extract individual files from an image (although I haven't used it). So I would expect some of the work to look into the file structure within an image may already have been done. To simplify implementation perhaps the program could look for a file with a particular name (example $TBI_OMITPATHS.txt) in the root of the partition being imaged, being a simple text file list of folders (including all subfolders) to omit, so no change required to the screen layouts.
I'm sure a lot of people would find this a very significant upgrade. I tried to look to see if such a feature has already been asked for here, but couldn't find any. No doubt the regular lurkers here will know.