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Including and excluding files on TSM.

Backing a single directory

The simplest way is of course to run the dsmc command line client and point it to the directory in question, perhaps using cron or some other scheduler or event handler. The invocation would then be as simple as: (unix client OS)

dsmc inc /var/lib/pg_data/psql_dumps/

but in case you would need the machine to run using the built-in dsmcad scheduler, perhaps for reporting reasons, it will default to all locally-connected filesystems so the exclusions need to work in several steps in order to achieve single-dir backup like the above example.

Below is an example for windows, where you first specify a single file system using the DOMAIN C: specifier to say that out of all connected disks and filesystems it might find, only take C: into consideration. The default for DOMAIN is called ALL-LOCAL and is a global option meant to only be listed once in the file with the disks one wants to consider, if ALL-LOCAL is not suitable for you. It also only applies to invocations like dsmc inc where you do not specify any path, or when dsmcad starts backup on a schedule.

Then follows an EXCLUDE to match all files in all possible subdirectories under C:, and lastly an INCLUDE-statement to add back files that does exist under Program Files\docgenerator\ on C:

DOMAIN C:
EXCLUDE C:\...\*
INCLUDE "C:\Program Files\docgenerator\...\*"

How includes interact

You might view it as if INCLUDE and EXCLUDE statements are parsed backwards, from last line to first, and acting on the first match.

In the above example, files matching the docgenerator directory will be considered for backups and the rule matching will stop since it matched an existing rule. The earlier rule that excludes all files will not cover the files in docgenerator, but all other files.

Also, the output when running a setup like the above will be backing up directory structures and names, but not files in them, so it might look like it is about to back the whole disk, even though it is not.

Lastly, if you use EXCLUDE.DIR "/some/path" the backup client will NOT enter that directory at all, so you may not include files in that directory tree, the client skips everything covered by an EXCLUDE.DIR rule.

Combining includes and excludes that select whether to backup or not with includes and excludes for compression/encryption is a separate topic, explained here.

Handling common includes/excludes

The dsm.sys / dsm.opt files used by TSM clients can have a command to point include/exclude rules to a separate file.

INCLEXCL /opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin/dsm.inclexcl

which might be a good way to handle local exclusions depending on the role of the computer but still keeping the general options in dsm.sys / dsm.opt generic. It could also be used to give local admins permissions to edit include/exclude rules without being able to affect other TSM configuration entries.

Sum of all include/exclude rules

There are several sources of rules for what to exclude and include which come from different places. One of the sources are the above-mentioned local preferences in the config files.

Another is the client itself which, based on your operating system, knows which virtual filesystems (like /proc on linux) and files (pagefile.sys, hiberfile.sys on windows) should always be exempt from backups.

Lastly, the server policies might add rules. In our case we have mostly EXCLUDE.COMPRESS rules to not try to compress files which are already compressed like .zip, .jpg and so on.

We have no generic exclusions serverside for things like names of trashcan folders, Firefox caches, iTunes libraries, core files and so on. It is up to your organisation to select what is meant to go in backups and what isn't, especially across different operating systems, where one single filename might have vastly differing meanings.

You can ask any configured client about the sum of rules with dsmc query inclexcl which will list all applicable rules and at which place they originate from.

Other uses for include/excludes

Apart from the broad "to include in backups or not", the include statements can also be used to select management classes of files and directories, which in turn control retention times, ie for how long the backups will be kept. You might set a very short retention time on operating system files but long retentions on personal document folders on the same machine.

On a configured node, you can run dsmc query mgmt to see available selections, returning something like this:

Domain Name               : ORGNAME_FILE_DEDUP
Activated Policy Set Name : STANDARD
Activation date/time      : 2015-05-15 15:55:55
Default Mgmt Class Name   : 30DAYS
Grace Period Backup Retn. : 3655 day(s)
Grace Period Archive Retn.: 3655 day(s)
MgmtClass Name            : 180DAYS
Description               : Files are saved for 180 days
MgmtClass Name            : 30DAYS
Description               : Files are saved 30 days
...

where the names of the MgmtClass are what we are looking for ( 30DAYS and 180DAYS in that example list)

To set different retentions for OS files and personal files on a unix machine, something like this can be set:

INCLUDE / 30DAYS
INCLUDE /home 180DAYS

The next time you run the backup, the new expiration dates will be applied to the current (and future) version of the files, something the client will call rebinding, which means a new class gets set on each file covered by the new non-default retention policy.

For unknown reasons, rebinding does not work on files being Archived using dsmc archive ..., only on backups. In order to actually change MgmtClass on archive files, you need to pull them back with dsmc retrieve and then archive them again.