What is "Temporary Files" under source tab of job --> exclude

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1

I’m trying to determine what “temporary files” exclusion setting does there.

I also noticed that this set the option

--exclude-files-attributes="temporary"

In looking through the code, I think this means “Duplicati temporary files”, but I couldn’t find clear evidence of that–at least based on my experience.

–Dave

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To be honest, I’m not sure myself what all is excluded with that and the other options for that parm.

I’ve been meaning to look at the code, and hoping it’s something that’s documented. :slight_smile:

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According to the source :

               new CommandLineArgument("exclude-files-attributes", CommandLineArgument.ArgumentType.String, Strings.Options.ExcludefilesattributesShort, Strings.Options.ExcludefilesattributesLong(Enum.GetNames(typeof(System.IO.FileAttributes)))),

So, it’s looking for a file attribute ‘temporary’. That doesn’t appear to be something you can manually set on a regular file, but can be programatically set by issuing a GetTempFileName windows function.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa363875(v=vs.85).aspx

Long story short: It’s excluding files which an application has created and requested to be ‘temporary’ - One imagines all of those will live in your (default) \Windows\Temp folder.

1 Like
4

Hi Steve,

I really appreciate your response. Very interesting. It never occured to me that files could have a hidden attribute that noted it was a temporary file.
Now if only I understood why the following file was tagged as temporary:
C:\Program Files\Google\Update\GoogleUpdate.exe

For those that are intersted, here are a few links I found that help locate those such files, and/or clean them up:
Powershell to query:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/a909a693-362e-47b1-a0d4-2b111e2440be/how-is-temporary-attribute-getting-set?forum=winservergen

Interesting Powershell command from above link was:
Get-childitem C:\ -recurse -force | where {$_.attributes -match "temporary"} | Export-Csv tempfiles.csv

A GUI that may be interesting:
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/bulk_file_changer.html

Removing temp file attribute:
https://community.spiceworks.com/scripts/show/1102-remove-temp-file-attribute

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Ahhh, Nirsoft - makers of quality tools for over a decade. :smiley:

Thanks for the additional info!

Note that I edited your post to turn the code sample into code formatting (surrounded it with left-ticks) and the URLs into actual links (to make using them easier and allow usage logging).

1 Like
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Thank you for fixing my post formatting.