AOMEI Backupper Help Guides

How to Exclude files/folders in AOMEI Backupper?

Introduction

With AOMEI Backupper, you can backup important data to secure your date. In case of files and folders loss, you can easily recover your data. There might be massive data to backup. However, in some cases, it is unnecessary to backup all data. For example, you might need to backup only certain files (like music and movie), or you might not intend to backup some types of files. Or, you just expect to backup folders with specific names. To do accurate backup, fiter settings in AOMEI Backupper will be helpful to include and exclude some files/folders in your backup.

How to Exclude Files/Folders from File Backup/Sync

You can directly exclude files/folders from file backup and sync in AOMEI Backupper. (Take Basic Sync as an example)

1. Select Basic Sync under the Sync tab.

2. Click "Add Folder" to select folders to sync.

3. Click the Funnel button to open the Filter Settings interface.

There are 3 options available to include/exclude files/folders:

File Inclusion Mask: Specify the files that you need to sync. Wildcards are supported and separate multiple masks with semi-colon (*.doc;*.xls;*.ppt ).
File Exclusion Mask: Specify the files that you need to exclude. Wildcards are supported and separate multiple masks with semi-colon (*.temp;*.tmp;*.bak;*~*).
Folder Exclusion Mask: Specify the folders that you need to exclude. Wildcards are supported and separate multiple masks with semi-colon (*.temp;temp*).

 

Here are 3 examples to show how to configure inclusion/exclusion:

Case1: We select folder "A" as the source. There are 3 different types of files under A: .xls, .doc, .txt.

Example 1: If you want to only sync all .doc and .txt files, you can enter file extensions " *.doc;*.txt" in File Inclusion Mask. So, only files with the same extension will be synchronized to the destination path.

Tips: Please enter only the file extension, not the file name or file path.

The sync result in the destination path will be: (Only .doc and .txt files will be synchronized to the destination path.

Example 2: If you do not want to sync .doc and .txt files, you can exclude them by entering file extensions" *.doc;*.txt" in File Exclusion Mask. As a result, all files with the same extensions will not be synchronized to the destination path.

Tips: Please enter only the file extension, not the file name or file path.

The sync result in the destination path will be: (Only .xls files will be synchronized to the destination path.)

Case 2: We select the folder "Test" as the source. Under "Test", there are 6 different folders with different names: A, B, Document, Movie, Music, Text.

Example 3. If you do not want to sync folders named "Document" and "Text", you can enter folder names "Document;Text" in Folder Exclusion Mask. Therefore, folders with names "Document" and "Text" will not be synchronized, i.e. all folders with other names will be synchronized to the destination path.

Tips: Please enter only the folder name, not the folder path.

The sync result in the destination path will be: (Only remaining folders will be synchronized to the destination path.)

How to Exclude Files from System/Partition/Disk Backup

AOMEI Backupper currently doesn’t have the function to exclude files from System/Partition/Disk Backup. If you need to exclude files from System/Partition/Disk Backup, you need to edit the Registry to exclude files manually.
1. Press Win+R and enter “regedit” to open the Registry Editor.

2. Navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToSnapshot

3. Create a new Multi-String Value.

4. If you want to exclude all .txt files in “D:\Test”, the Value data should be “D:\Test\*.txt”.

5. Click OK and run the backup again, then .txt files should be excluded.