Home > Data Protection > PowerProtect Data Manager > Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: File System Backup and Recovery > Inclusion and exclusion filters for file system data protection
File Filters enable you to include or exclude specific files and folders from a policy that are based on the filter conditions. Earlier versions of PowerProtect Data Manager provided exclusion filtering with four conditions. PowerProtect Data Manager version 19.16 and later is enhanced with new inclusion filtering with six conditions.
The inclusion filter allows you to include subset of files from the assets that are being backed up. The exclusion clause further trims this selection by excluding files from the subset of files, selected by the inclusion clause. For both include and exclude clauses, the number of conditions has been increased to six, along with the additional operators that can be used with these conditions to specify a subset of files to be backed up within the selected assets.
The new file filter capability supports two levels of nested filter clauses. Each filter can have up to 10 clauses with an additional 10 for nested conditions. Include and exclude clauses can both be present in one filter to fine-tune the files that are being backed up.
You can create filters that allow PowerProtect Data Manager to exclude or include a subset of files from the assets being backed up.
The following table explains the supported conditions and operators in file filters:
Filter conditions | Supported operators |
Folder path* |
|
File/Folder name |
|
File type* |
|
File Size |
|
Creation Date |
|
Modification Data |
|
When you apply a filter to a protection policy, by default PowerProtect Data Manager uses the file-based backup technology.
File-based backups traverse through the entire directory structure to back up the subset of files defined by the filter conditions. Inclusion and Exclusion filters allow you to tune your backups so that a specific subset of files is chosen for backup, but they take longer than block-based backups to complete.
Use the PowerProtect Data Manager UI to add filters that can include or exclude specific files and folders, based on certain conditions such as folder path, file/folder name, file type, file size, creation date, and modification date.
Navigate to Protection > File Filters. You can define a new exclusion or inclusion filter on the File Filters page.
After the filters are created, filters can be applied during the new file system protection policy creation, or they can be applied to an existing file system protection policy.