PowerScale OneFS Web Administration Guide

Excluding directories in replication

You can exclude directories from being replicated by replication policies even if the directories exist under the specified source directory.

By default, all files and directories under the source directory of a replication policy are replicated to the target cluster. However, you can prevent directories under the source directory from being replicated.

If you specify a directory to exclude, files and directories under the excluded directory are not replicated to the target cluster. If you specify a directory to include, only the files and directories under the included directory are replicated to the target cluster; any directories that are not contained in an included directory are excluded.

If you both include and exclude directories, any excluded directories must be contained in one of the included directories; otherwise, the excluded-directory setting has no effect. For example, consider a policy with the following settings:

• The root directory is /ifs/data
• The included directories are /ifs/data/media/music and /ifs/data/media/movies
• The excluded directories are /ifs/data/archive and /ifs/data/media/music/working

In this example, the setting that excludes the /ifs/data/archive directory has no effect because the /ifs/data/archive directory is not under either of the included directories. The /ifs/data/archive directory is not replicated regardless of whether the directory is explicitly excluded. However, the setting that excludes the /ifs/data/media/music/working directory does have an effect, because the directory would be replicated if the setting was not specified.

In addition, if you exclude a directory that contains the source directory, the exclude-directory setting has no effect. For example, if the root directory of a policy is /ifs/data, explicitly excluding the /ifs directory does not prevent /ifs/data from being replicated.

Any directories that you explicitly include or exclude must be contained in or under the specified root directory. For example, consider a policy in which the specified root directory is /ifs/data. In this example, you could include both the /ifs/data/media and the /ifs/data/users/ directories because they are under /ifs/data.

Excluding directories from a synchronization policy does not cause the directories to be deleted on the target cluster. For example, consider a replication policy that synchronizes /ifs/data on the source cluster to /ifs/data on the target cluster. If the policy excludes /ifs/data/media from replication, and /ifs/data/media/file exists on the target cluster, running the policy does not cause /ifs/data/media/file to be deleted from the target cluster.