Exclusion List for Linux clients

Thank you for the information, it is much appreciated

Once I do this, is it logged anywhere on the client that when a backup starts, it logs something like “excluding /usr/local” …. Then starts backup…yada yada

As an example

Thank you

David

Thank you

My pleasure!

A few things to note -- best practice is to set exclusions in the dataset rather than in avtar.cmd since the flags in avtar.cmd apply to all backups, including plug-in backups. When a plug-in invokes avtar, it may report warnings about the exclude patterns in the log. This may bubble up to the activity monitor.

Managing excludes in avtar.cmd can also get out of hand very quickly if you have many clients that have specialized requirements.

If you have one or a few clients where you need to exclude particular files, you can create a dataset with the appropriate excludes and override the dataset only on those clients. There is a checkbox in the GUI to force a client to use a specific dataset instead of the group dataset.

Will these exclusions affect image level backups for vmware vms in any way by using the avtar.cmd?

You should not set any flags in avtar.cmd on a VMware Image proxy unless asked to do so by support. File excludes will not work with image backups regardless -- image backups operate at the disk level.

I guess you mean the proxy server?

What I meant is we have some virtual machines that we take both filesystem level and image level backups. We have to cause the filesystem used within our linux vms does not support file level restores from image backups.

So on a vm I will set up the filesystem backups on one schedule and the image level on another schedule.

For the filesystem level I may use the avtar.cmd.. to what extent im not sure yet.

I understand now. Filesystem client excludes inside the guest will have no effect on the image backups. The image backups will not even be aware of the guest level agent.

Avamar 7 supports FLR for ext4 filesystems so if you're using ext4 and want to drop guest level backups, you may want to consider upgrading.

Really? I was under the impression that Avamar 7 still does not support FLR for Ext4 with VMware Image Level Backup, but that does not seem to be a case anymore: https://support.emc.com/docu48222_Avamar-7.0-Release-Notes.pdf?language=en_US

Am I reading this correctly and the "VMware" stands for Image Level Backups?

What about through the GUI, tools-->manage datasets? say you wanted to exclude all .Z files could you add them to the exclusions there *.Z, say if you didnt have access to the client?

If this is a filesystem backup and you want to exclude all files that end with the .Z extension, you would set the exclude to:

--exclude=**.Z

When specifying Avamar wildcards, * matches a single path element, where ** matches any number of path elements.

Its actually a couple database servers, top high change rate clients, we are sending just about a TB a day across the network and storing it. Not an efficient way to use Avamar. The DBAs are compressing and as you know, Avamar and compression do not mix. I want to exclude all .gz and all .Z files from these backups. So your saying in the dataset I can add --exclude=**.Z or .gz and it will catch them all?

If you're sure there are no valuable files with that extension, that will do the trick but a top level exclude like that has a pretty big blast radius. You might want to consider applying the exclude as something like --exclude=path/to/database/directory/**.Z just in case.

I follow. Thank you for the chat and suggestions. Much appreciated!