I want to know how to find specific files in my backup by using wildcards. I’ve read the manual about “find”, but I guess I’m using it not correctly as the result isn’t what I was expecting.
Here’s my test scenario:
I have four files in the same subfolder named
_DSC4230-HDR-edt.tif
_DSC4230-HDR-edt-2.tif
_DSC4230-HDR-edt-3.tif
_DSC4230-HDR-edt-edt.tif
If I use “_DSC4230*.tif” as the wildcard, none of these files is found.
If I use “*_DSC4230*.tif” it works well, but to my understanding the leading asterisk shouldn’t be necessary to find these files.
This is how it works by design. Duplicati store every single file including its full absolute path. One of the advantages is that search queries using simple wildcards are a bit more flexible:
“*_DSC4230*.tif” will find all.TIF files containing _DSC4230, but also files that have this character sequence in one of its parent’s folder, like C:\Pictures\Subfolder_DSC42301234\MyPicture.tif.
“C:\Pictures*_DSC4230.tif” will find all .TIF files named DSC4230 that are located in one of the subfolders of C:\Pictures.
“*\Holiday2019\????_DSC4230.tif” will find all filenames ending with _DSC4230 beginning with 4 random characters, in a folder named Holiday2019.
For even more flexibility, use a regular expression. Regex has a slightly higher learning curve, but is much more powerful. See this article for more information about the syntax.