You may add a Rule, view a Rule, or modify a Rule in the Rules preferences pane. To add a rule, click the Add Rule button, which looks like a plus sign (+) below the list of Rules. To view or edit a rule, select a Rule in the list, then click the Edit Rule button, which looks like a pencil. The Rule dialog appears, showing its three parts:
TheRule namecan be anything you like. It will appear in the Rules tab of Preferences and Scripts, and will appear in other places within Retrospect.
Theinclude conditionssection is where you tell Retrospect what files and folders you wish the Rule to encompass during the operation.
Theexclude conditionssection is where you tell Retrospect what files and folders to skip during execution.
Each rule must have a Rule name, and then you should add any include or exclude criteria you wish. The default Rule, All Files, has no specific include or exclude criteria, meaning that it includes any file and excludes none.
The scope menus allow you to define the extent of the conditions in either the include or exclude sections. The choices available from the scope menus are All, None, or Any. In the example in the screenshot above, the Any choice in the include conditions scope menu allows the rule to apply if any of the listed conditions are true, allowing the rule to
encompass the user files and settings for Mac, Windows, or Linux clients. In this way, the Any choice acts as a logicalorcondition.
The All choice works as a logicalandcondition. For example, imagine that you want to backup all of the QuickTime movie files that are part of a particular project for your client Widgetco. You’ve previously saved all the movie files into a single folder. To add the All condition, hold down the Option key on the keyboard. The Add condition plus sign (+) on the “Any of the following are true” scope bar will change to an ellipsis (...), which you can then click to add the All condition. (The None condition is created in the same way, only
you can change the All condition to the None condition.) You would then create two conditions:
▪ Folder Name contains Widgetco
▪ File Name ends with .mov
The include and exclude conditions sections allow you to add one or more conditions to the rule. You do that by clicking the Add condition button. Similarly, you can delete conditions by clicking the Remove condition button next to an existing condition, and you can also reorder conditions by dragging them on the screen (though it is not possible to drag conditions between the Include and Exclude criteria sections). Rules can have any number of conditions.
After you have added a condition, you need to build it using the pop-up menus and, optionally, the entry field in the condition.
The pop-up menus and entry field are contextual, meaning that whether or not they appear and their contents change depending on the values of other elements within the condition. For example, the first and second pop-up menus interact in the fashion shown on the next page:
The third pop-up menu changes depending on the choices made in the first two menus. For conditions that will also require user input in the entry field, the choices in this third menu narrow the scope of the entry. For example, if you have chosen File in the first menu, and Name in the second menu, the third menu provides the choicescontains, begins with, ends with, is, is not,andis like. The entry field will also be present in this example. As another example, if you were to choose File in the first menu and one of the Date conditions in the second menu, the line changes to show two date-related menus, the first of which containsbefore, after, exactly, not, on or before, on or after,andwithin. The second date related menu containstoday, backup date,andspecific date(if you choose this, and entry field appears where you can enter the date).
As you can see, there are a large number of permutations available for each condition. Experiment with the menu choices to select the items that you want to include in the Rule.
First pop-up menu choice Second pop-up menu choices
Folder Mac Path Windows Path UNIX path Attributes Kind Date accessed Date created Date modified Date backed up Size used
Size on disk is (folder only)
Size on disk is not (folder only)
Label
Volume Name
Drive letter
Connection type
File system
Source Host Name
Login name
Saved rule Includes
Excludes
The “Saved rule” condition allows you to nest rules within rules. For example, to include the All Files Except Cache Files rule as a basis in your own custom rules, you would add the condition “Saved rule…includes…All Files Except Cache Files” in the Include criteria section beneath the “Any of the following are true” condition.
When you are done editing the Rule, click the Save button.
Exclude conditions always take precedence over Include conditions when Retrospect applies the Rule. For example, if a Rule has a statement which includes a user’s
Documents folder and a statement which excludes the enclosing Users folder, the files in the Documents folder will not be selected.