Yes cool feature.
And the possibility to exclude a domain or subscription would be appreciate !!

Great idea !
And please, add the possibility to exclude some domains from the General Backup !!

Yes, that's a great idea !!

Yes, exclude Folders i.e. "images" would be awesome.
for a quick Backup possibility (before Updating CMS)

I was looking for such a feature and found this poll. :)
In my case, I have a Joomla site and a directory with thousands of photos delivered by simple static html showcases for my clients in subfolders. All those photos are already on my local hard disk and backups. It would be sad to spoil high performance server disk space that we pay an expensive price to duplicate all that data. Deselecting some subdomains could be a first step in the good direction.

now that we are running plesk 12.5 and using the incremental backup features, we are noticing that the backups are still pretty large due to changes in log files and log file rotation. to reduce the amount of space being wasted by backing up these log files, it would be fantastic if there was an option to exclude items like this.

A software development company host large ( sometimes only temporary ) *.iso - files on their webspace and as well patches, video and music files, which change very often during development. There is absolutely no need for backups in certain folders, as they state, but they still want selected persons having access to these files ( testing ).
Temporary folders from forums , CMS and analytics are absolutely useless backup - folders and just consume space and process - time during backup procedures, which could be avoided easily by excluding such folders in possible options.

Yes I need to exclude files and folders NOT for disk space reasons.

We have some forum software on our server PHPBB and for some reason the cache folder generates backup warning emails EVERY night it backs up. Plesk support have been unable to fix the issue. I want to exclude the cache folder from future backups - it’s pointless backing the folder up anyway…

Error email…..

Backup task finished on host xx.com.

Task was created by server xx with guid (2c7b26d0-395c-4b81-b6c8-07d677834df5)

Creation date is: 2015-Jun-18 04:09:02
Task status is: warnings

Dump full name is:

Apart from cache and temp folders, customers can have videos or some kind of files that do not change at all or they have their own vopies, though it would be necessasary a full backup

At the moment only the command line tool "pleskbackup" can exclude reseller, clients or domain (file) from backup, see: http://download1.parallels.com/Plesk/Doc/en-US/online/plesk-linux-advanced-administration-guide/index.htm?fileName=68839.htm

I suggest to add a text input at "Control Panel > Subscriptions > Backup Manager > Configure Scheduled Backup Settings" to edit the backup parameters (manually), so all "pleskbackup" command line features (such as exclude) can be used.

Also for me the cache directory of certain programs (PHPBB) causes plesk permissions errors when backing up. Plesk support have not been able to resolve. They are unimportant directories and I want to exclude them from backing up.

Thanks for explanation!

Yes, definitely regular full backup is important. There will be a schedule for incremental backups and another schedule for full backups

As I said:
- Temp and Cache directories of web apps (CMS and so on)
- "Cache" includes every generated content (like different resolutions of images and so) which could change daily and so would not get excluded by incremental backups
- I also have a case where some big archives are stored for customer download which can be reuploaded at anytime because we have inhouse backups of it
- Things I am not allowed to store anywhere else (german laws are VERY restrictive with user related data)
- A lot of thinks you and I cannot even imagine... ;)

BTW: Incremental are nice but not everybodys darling. In case of forward deltas one file in the history is compromised or defective you are screwed.
I hope, your implementation hast options for forward/backward deltas and much more important the interval for full backups.

Thanks for your quick response! Can you give more examples of what kind of files you would like to exclude (beyond mounted directories)?

@Sergey: Yes, I would still have that need because in my case I bind mounted directories to make it for read only for some FTP users and writable for others.
But even without this very spacial case there are several scenarios (for example data privacy or cache directories of web apps) which would require the ability to exclude things from backups.
@Ulrich: A good implementation of excludes would base on regular expressions which would cover filetypes/patterns and also directories.

To this idea I would like to add the request for a possibility to exclude certain folders (for example inside a domain) from backup.