Exclude disk

#1

How do you use the --exclude-disk? Do you add the disk file name that is on the volume share? Would I still need to run that to exclude a Raw device mapping?

#2

Woops you answered this in another post. Don’t forget to update the guise to help new users.

#3

I’ll update the guide today or tomorrow.

#4

Hi - I have this same question, and neither the other thread nor the guide answered this.

I have a VM that had two disks on two different datastores, each disk with the same name “ubuntuwebuzo.vmdk”.

I tried specifying the exclude path like this
–exclude-disk /vmfs/volumes/x2datastore2/ubuntuwebuzo/ubuntuwebuzo.vmdk

that didn’t work
then I added a second exclusion of the -flat file:

--exclude-disk /vmfs/volumes/x2datastore2/ubuntuwebuzo/ubuntuwebuzo.vmdk --threads 4 --exclude-disk /vmfs/volumes/x2datastore2/ubuntuwebuzo/ubuntuwebuzo-flat.vmdk

that didn’t work

Of course I didn’t try --exclude-disk ubuntuwebuzo.vmdk because that would exclude my main disk too on datastore1.

So, I went through the rigamarole of renaming the second virtual drive to ubuntuwebuzobackups.vmdk

Then I tried:
./vertical backup Manage-ubuntu-webuzo --exclude-disk ubuntuwebuzobackups.vmdk --threads 4

The result?

Uploading file ubuntuwebuzobackups-flat.vmdk
Using 4 uploading threads
Uploading ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 15.51MB/s 1 day 03:27:24 0.2%

So, it still doesn’t exclude it.

I could keep guessing here at what vertical wants, but I don’t have time.

Can you please tell me what syntax verticalbackup is expecting so I can exclude the “backups” disk and not be making backups of backups?

Thanks

#5

Allright, I couldn’t resist trying to get this working. Fortunately, it didn’t take much longer.

The solution was buried in another thread. It looks like verticalbackup is just doing a very basic pattern matching on the root name of the disk. So the only way to exclude all snapshots and versions of a disk is to do something like this:

--exclude-disk "*ubuntuwebuzobackups*"

This appears to work. Now, the next thing I have to test is whether

vertical cron ....

will work with this exclusion pattern.

#6

Yes, the path in the exclude pattern should be relative.

For the cron command, you’ll need to use two pairs of quotes, like this example in the user guide:

vertical cron 0 vm1 --email --subject '"Backup for vm1 has been completed successfully"'

You can always check the crontab file /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root to see if the command there is right.