Excluding an Entire Drive or Partition from CDP Replication

Question

A user having multiple partitions on a Windows or Linux CDP Agent would like to exclude an entire drive or partition from the backup process.

Solution

See http://wiki.r1soft.com/display/CDP/Devices.

If this is a fresh setup of an Agent, you can configure this when creating the Disk Safe. When entering the "Name" and selecting the "Agent," there are two check boxes at the bottom of that pop-up window under "Devices."

Automatically add new devices
Protect Storage Configuration

Deselect these options and click on "Create" in the bottom right corner, a confirmation screen will appear to acknowledge the Disk Safe has been created. Now another pop-up screen will appear to "Add Devices to Protect," click on "Add" to go to the next pop-up window.

Now you should see a split screen and in the top section left frame you should see all drives and partitions detected on that Agent OS.

Note
In CDP terms a partition is a Device.

You can click the green plus sign to add a Device to the Disk Safe.

Note
You cannot use the "Automatically add new devices" if you are excluding any Device on the Agent OS. Go back and select "Protect Storage Configuration" after you have selected and saved the Devices you want to replicate. If you don't protect what you configured manually, CDP could make changes for you unexpectedly when new Devices are detected on the Agent OS, so it is a good practice to do that.

If this is an existing Disk Safe and you want to remove a Device to be replicated by CDP, you can do that in the Device Manager area of the Disk Safe (see wiki article above). It is a good practice to create a new Disk Safe when doing this to get the size reduction of the Disk Safe (it is not mandatory). If you keep the existing Disk Safe the overall size will not reduce since the data in the previous Recovery Points will remain in the Disk Safe.

See http://wiki.r1soft.com/display/CDP/Disk+Safes.

We have a feature to allow simple File and Folder excludes, and an Advanced exclude function using Regex. These excludes can be time consuming and eat up resources, so they should be used with caution. CDP is a BLOCK (sector) level replication mechanism and must capture the entire partition of the filesystem at once, then it can perform any excludes you need. It is not designed to exclude more than 50% of the total data being replicated and as stated before any excludes come at a price (resources and time). If possible, you should segregate your data on different partitions to get the best performance from the CDP replication process.