Looking at the whole Filters article would be good, although it speaks mostly to what you see from the Edit as text view. I think there’s nothing that gets into details of how to work with GUI’s filter builder.
If you look at what comes from Exclude file, it seems to expect you to provide the complete file path. Looking at Exclude files whose names contain is closer, and doesn’t make you give specific path.
Exclude expression also seems to want you to give it the expression similarly to Exclude file, but from a terminology point of view it might be looking for a wildcard or regular expression to be provided.
Wildcard term is characters like * that you might have used on a command line. A ? is also acceptable.
If you want to use file globbing to specify rules,
?and*are allowed placeholders.?matches any single character.*specifies none or multiple characters. For example,*.txtwould specify all.txtfiles.
If you’re very used to this concept on command lines, you’ll get surprised that * crosses folder slashes.
On a command line, globbbing (a.k.a. wildcards) can be used in different context, e.g. don’t have to be from the drive letter (or other root). It works with the form you use. In Duplicati, everything is a full path, partly because relative paths would need a current directory to be relative to, but that’s not easily done.
Regular expressions are harder than wildcards, and probably best reserved for more complicated uses.
One way to handle this might to do your list as Exclude file filters, but repeats can use wildcards like *\parent.lock in Exclude expression. Checking Edit as text view against Filters syntax helps.
You can also solve all your locked file issues with snapshot-policy using Windows VSS, but the catch is having to run in an elevated Administrator group account. Setting up a Windows service will also work, however it’s a manual setup that’s a bit complicated, especially if not done initially. Directions found at:
Migrating from User to Service install on Windows
The somewhat older video below shows the basics of how to do an initial install as a Windows service:
