By default, all data present in a client is included in the default subclient for data protection and recovery operations. Including all data consumes storage space and affects the performance of backup and restore operations. To minimize the required storage space and optimize performance, data can be excluded from backup and restore operations using filters. Data can be excluded in the form of files, folders, directories, databases, and other objects.
Wildcards
Regular expressions (or wildcard characters) can be used to define content in a subclient, or to restore file system data. Wildcard expressions are characters such as * or ?. Regular expressions include patterns such as [a-f] or *.[l-n]df. The terms are interchangeable. The use of wildcards or regular expressions in defining filters is supported for most agents.
Filters
Filtering unnecessary data from data protection operations can reduce backup/migration time, storage space, and recovery time. Most, but not all agents, include some filtering capability at the subclient level. Subclient filters for File System Agents can be defined for a path, directory, or file level.