Filter question

How to specify filter so that only files created or modified after certain date will be backed up?

Hello @User1818 and welcome to the forum!

Are you on Windows? If so, How to backup files older than X days raised this question then created a script.
Questions about the script can be asked there. Also note the precaution about behavior you might notice…

I apologize, English isn’t my mother tongue. I just noticed I expressed myself incorrectly :face_with_raised_eyebrow: (I fixed my original question.)

So what I need is to back up files that are created (or modified) after a certain date, say, 1 November 2018, so all files created (or modified) after this date (2,3,4 November… etc) should be added to backup.

Thanks for the reply. To answer your question - yes, I’m on Windows. Workaround suggested in the thread you linked requires scripting knowledge (which I unfortunately don’t have), also I would like to avoid changing file attributes (I don’t want Duplicati or some script to modify my files in any way).

Isn’t there a way to specify such filter in Duplicati without using third party tools? Considering there is a lot of filtering options in Duplicati (even regular expressions) I thought specifying certain date shouldn’t be a problem?

The filtering in Duplicati is only applied for size and path. To filter with create/modified date, you need to also read the modification/creation timestamp, which Duplicati does not currently do.

So, no, you cannot filter by creation/modification date.

Can you explain why you want to make a backup of only a subset of the data? Is the older data not relevant anymore?

I have relatively big folder to back up - 110 Gb which is already backed up to 4 different locations (2 external hard drives and 2 clouds). You can imagine how much time it took to compress, encrypt, upload, then download (twice), decrypt and decompress (to test integrity) this 110Gb of data. I don’t want and don’t need Duplicati to repeat all that job again. That will take a lot of bandwidth and processor time used in vain, which is unacceptable for me. So all I need is Duplicati to back up only new and modified files. That will be perfectly enough.

Maybe you could consider adding date as a filter to Duplicati, I’m sure it should be trivial, since you don’t need to code any complicated logic. I guess it’s not a common use case, so it’s up to you. On the other hand, I don’t see how file size could be needed more often than date? Or why would you even need file size as a filter? :thinking: But that’s just me.

I like to join in. I have the same need as User1818. I have 100GB of (mainly) old and backuped data. The relevant files are those, which I worked in the last few weeks with, about 10GB. My actual backup tool (Second Copy) is configured to only copy files which were modified/created within the last four weeks. The destination is some small usb stick. Copying goes fast and would be a lot faster using duplicati.

Of course I could buy a couple of larger usb sticks, doesn’t make a huge financetial difference. I just don’t like the idea to backup unnessary stuff.

I also have the same requirement, to be able to only backup files that were modified since a particular date, as full snapshot images of the volumes get stored on physical media, not in the cloud.