Optimize archive on Context Menu

[Marque IV]

PowerArchiver Backup Express Lite is a terrific solution for what we need… an automated way to back stuff up, simply and quickly. However, there’s one nagging thing about it that bugs me. I can’t filter specific directories, just files. I’ll explain.

As a developer myself, I routinely back up our source code. The problem is our source code is littered with compiler build and debug information that, since it gets generated at every build, doesn’t need to be stored in the archive and just takes up space, and in a lot of cases stores redundant files wasting even more.

As an example, when just selecting our source code directory, the size is close to 4 or 5 megs. When excluding directories named BIN or OBJ–the specific directoris that I’m referrign to, it’s only around 500K (0.5 megs!) or one-tenth the size and that’s BEFORE compression! Allowing us to specifically exclude all directories named ‘BIN’ or ‘OBJ’ but include everything else would give us what we want.

Actually, if you could add the ability to filter folders right from the main create archive screens (i.e. just using the reg. tool instead of having to use PABEL, that would be a bonus!

Another, and related idea is that instead of having the ‘all things’ approach with the ‘Include Subfolders’ option, just make the list of items to include a treeview instead of a list where the top-level items are either files or folders that you’ve manually added (as you have it now) but if an item is a folder, you can expand it to manually select/unselect it’s subfolders. Basically a pseudo ‘checked explorer view’ for each item that’s a folder. Then add a button and/or context menu to ‘select/unselect/toggle’ a folder’s items and all it’s children. Simple! Sweet!

While the latter would be a pretty big re-write, the former of allowing us to filter folders too instead of just files one would imagine wouldn’t be too hard to implement.

So… any takers? Anyone else agree?

[TBGBe]

This configuration could be useful, but is probably too complex for an “Express Lite” tool.

However, there have been rumours of a new PA backup utility coming - maybe enhanced filtering will be possible when that tool is available?

In the meantime, two workarounds occur to me -

1. Could you reorganise your environment to keep your source and object/bin directories completely seperate? This is what I did.

2. Disable the “include subdirectories” and explicitly select the folders you want to back-up. As this is stored in a “script” (the pbs file), it only has to be configured once. I do this now to exclude temp or cache files etc.