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Title
Active Block Mapping (ABM) and File Exclusions -
Description
How to enable Active Block Mapping (ABM) and add file exclusions in agentless backup.
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Cause
Active Block Mapping is an agentless backup feature that queries the file system header of each volume to gather a list of blocks actively in use on the volume. Used in conjunction with change block tracking (CBT), Rapid Recovery is able to backup only the changed active blocks on a volume. Rapid Recovery uses this information to:- More accurately report used space on a volume.
- Only copy actively used blocks of data from a volume.
- Allow files to be excluded from backup.
The following are limitations of ABM:
- ABM only works with NTFS volumes.
- Does not support dynamic disks.
- Speed of backups can degrade with many exclusions configured.
- Exclusions cannot use environment variables (example: %TEMP%).
- Exclusions do not support for drive letters.
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Resolution
To enable ABM:
- From the Core Console, in the left navigation area, click the host or VM for which you want to change the
ABM settings. - From the Summary page of the machine, click Settings.
- From the list of machine settings on the left side of the Settings page, click ABM Settings.
- Under ABM settings you have multiple options that can be modified:
- Enable Active Block Mapping (enables ABM on the chosen VM or if enabled on the hypervisor level it enables ABM for all VMs)
- Enable swap file exclusions (When set to "Yes" this setting excludes swap files such as pagefile.sys, hiberfil.sys, and swapfile.sys)
- Exclude subdirectories (When set to "Yes" this setting applies the exclusions placed in the "Paths" box to all subfolders of the path specified)
Rapid Recovery and ABM allow you to exclude files from backup. To enable an exclusion you need to specify a path to exclude. Rapid Recovery uses file globbing when excluding files (this is similar to how the windows command line "dir" command works. This means that each path needs to specify the files to exclude, not just a folder path. Paths are not case sensitive. The question mark (?) and star (*) wildcards are permitted. Below is a table of the exclusions that you can make and the expected result of the exclusion. All example exclusions are based on the following hypothetical files/folders on a system:
- D:\File1.txt
- D:\File2.rtf
- D:\Folder\File1.txt
- D:\Folder\File2.rtf
Path Exclude subfolders option checked? Files excluded from backup
file1.txt No D:\File1.txt file?.txt No D:\File1.txt
file?.* No D:\File1.txt
D:\File2.rtf
*.* No D:\File1.txt
D:\File2.rtf
file1.txt Yes D:\File1.txt
D:\Folder\File1.txt
file?.txt Yes D:\File1.txt
D:\Folder\File1.txt
file?.* Yes D:\File1.txt
D:\Folder\File1.txt
D:\File2.rtf
D:\Folder\File2.rtf
*.* Yes D:\Folder\File1.txt
D:\Folder\File2.rtf
folder\file1.txt Yes D:\Folder\File1.txt folder\*.* Yes D:\Folder\File1.txt
D:\Folder\File2.rtf
Below are some common exclusions and how to implement them:
To avoid backing up all the files in a folder:
- Exclude subdirectories = "No"
- Path = folder1\folder2\*.*
To avoid backing up all the tmp files in a single directory:
- Exclude subdirectories = "No"
- Path = folder1\folder2\*.tmp
To avoid backing up all the tmp files in folder1 and folder2:
- Exclude subdirectories = "Yes"
- Path = folder1\*.tmp
- From the Core Console, in the left navigation area, click the host or VM for which you want to change the