I have a set of filters set up for sync, so that it skips several directories that I do not want to synchronize on my external drive. It has worked for several years with no problems under version 12, but moving to version 13 it ignores my filters.
I have the filter checkmark checked, and it has the filter name, and I can click on the little filter icon and display my filters, but they are being ignored.
Can we see the filter?
This filter is from version 12 and it works there, but on version 13 it ignores the filter and wants to sync everything, even the folders it' supposed to skip.
Things like Location No-Match Temp need to either be complete paths (of the parent folders) or wildcards/regex that match those paths. Not just names.
E.g. If you're using regular expressions, change that to .+\\Temp($|\\.+) if the aim is for it to (not) match everything in or below the temp folder.
More detail in How to filter items by location or sub-folder
You could also simplify it like this, which will also be faster by using Sub-Folder to avoid even going inside the unwanted folders:
In text format, for easier copy and paste (click "Edit as Text" at the top right of the filter editor):
name nomatch "(pagefile|swapfile).sys"
subfolder nomatch (
name match "(Temp|My Backups|...your other folder names...)"
)
So, this is a change from the way it was able to be done in V12, correct? I have not changed anything, and currently I reverted back to V12 so that I could continue to to use it. I would much rather that I could make it work with version 13, so I will give it a shot with the subfolder settings
I think I found the problem. In version 12, if the option delete destination files that aren't in the source is clicked, and the filter was NO MATCH Temp, then anything that was in the z:/Temp folder was skipped whether it was in the source folder or not. In effect it completely skipped the source folder for directories that were on both the source and the target.
So, if you had a bunch of backups in the z:/Temp folder, because Temp was specified on the filter, the backups were not copied to the backup drive (going from hard drive to USB), so when you came the other way (USB to hard drive) they were not touched either.
Now, under V13, if you have a filter for nomatch Temp, and you copy from the USB drive back to the Hard drive, all of the backups that were in the Hard Drive Temp folder are removed.
That's a big change and sort of defeats the purpose of having the filters.
In my case, I have a Z:\Temp with a SubFolder called SoftwareAG, that has 47,000 files in it, which I don't need to backup to take with me to work. When I get to work, I don't want my Z:\Temp folder to be touched at all, but if I leave the delete destination files that aren't on the source, then it wants to delete the 52,000 files that I have int he SoftwareAG sub-directory of Z:\Temp there.
Under Version 12, if you filtered out the main folder, it also filtered out the sub-folders of that directory.
What does Version 13 not work that way any more?
Location has always meant the full parent path, not just part of the path.
It's possible 12 was always doing a partial regex match instead of a full one, allowing it to match substrings of the location even if the full location didn't match. If so, what 13 does is more correct, IMO. (But I've not confirmed that changed, and it's possible the filter you were using before worked for a more obscure reason.)
Sub-Folder doesn't have to be used. You can do it the same way you were doing it in 12, if you fix the regular expressions (i.e. add .* to the start and end of them, or similar). But using Sub-Folder is much faster and you should use it because of that. It worked in 12 as well, and isn't new.
My mistake, I overlooked that we were talking about filtering the Synchronize tool, which invalidates a lot of my earlier advice about using Sub-folder.
Sub-folder can't be used with Synchronize. You'll need to edit the filter to use Location or Full Path instead, similar to what you were doing before.
But remember that the regex or wildcard has to match the entire path (Full Path) or parent path (Location), not just part of it.
Using Full Path and a wildcard is the easiest. For example:
*\(Temp|My Backups|...your other folder names...)\*
Use wildcards.I've also updated the related FAQ to tidy it up and show how to use Full Path:
Unfortunately, anything that doesn’t exist on the source wants to be deleted on the target, that’s great for going to the backup USB drive (because I don't need backups of backups), but when I come back from the USB, it wants to delete the directories and files that were skipped on the copy to the USB drive.
The way I do backups is that I backup my SSD's to a 12TB HDD, and I don't want those backups on the HDD copied to my USB drive for moving between systems, (My other system has it's own 12TB HDD with backups of the SSD's on it already), so I want to skip the backup directories and all their subdirectories (those backups are just the contents of the 4 SSD's as straight copies), and just copy the stuff that is not copies of the various SSD's.
The old Filter using location, would completely skip the directories I named, and all or their sub-directories, and not try to copy them or delete them if they existed on the copy back. I do this sync process quite frequently, and it has worked perfectly for several years (until I moved to V13).
I'm trying to do that same thing, If I name a directory to not copy, I also don't want to delete the contents of that directory (if it exists) on the target, but if I didn't specifically name it to be skipped, then I do want to delete files that don't exist on my source.
That appears to be the big part of what has changed between V12 and V13