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  1. Home
  2. Veritas NetBackup™ Administrator's Guide, Volume I
  3. Section V. Configuring backups
  4. Creating backup policies
  5. Backup Selections tab
  6. Files that are excluded from backups by default
Veritas NetBackup™ Administrator's Guide, Volume I

Files that are excluded from backups by default

By default, a number of files and file states are not backed up by NetBackup.

You can also exclude specific files from automatic backups by specifying the files or directories in an exclude list on the client.

See About excluding files from automatic backups.

By default, NetBackup does not back up the following files:

  • NFS files or directories. To back up NFS files, enable Follow NFS.

  • Files or directories in a different file system. To back up files in a different file system, enable Cross mount points.

  • Files or directories with path lengths longer than 1023 characters.

  • Files or directories in which the operating system does not return inode information (the lstat system call fails).

  • Directories that NetBackup cannot access (the cd command cannot access).

  • Socket special files. (Named pipes are backed up, however.)

  • Locked files when locked by an application that currently has the file open.

  • Busy files. If a file is open, NetBackup backs up the last saved version of the file.

  • Files or directories beneath a bind mount (Linux).

NetBackup automatically excludes the following file system types on most platforms:

  • cdrom (all UNIX platforms)

  • cachefs (AIX, Solaris, UnixWare)

  • devpts (Linux)

  • mntfs (Solaris)

  • proc (UNIX platforms)

    Does not exclude automatically for AIX, so /proc must be added manually to the exclude list. If /proc is not added manually, partially successful backups may result with the ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES directive on AIX.

  • tmpfs (Linux)

  • usbdevfs (Linux)

See Follow NFS (policy attribute).

See Cross mount points (policy attribute).

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