One elegant way to reduce the amount of data to backed up is to control some exclude rules by enforcing client option sets. If the option “-Force=Yes” is set, the client option set overrules any local setting of the clients.
For windows clients the setting of DOMAIN ALL-LOCAL also includes the backup of the systemstate (Windows Server 2008 and newer, Windows7 and newer). Due to our experience at the GWDG no user wants to restore the windows system itself but data only. Therefore the backup of the system state makes non-needed effort only. And the quite large count of registry entries causes a certain growth of the ISP database.
Excluding the system state is done by the following rule:
DOmain -SYSTEMSTATE
adding this rule to an existing client option set:
DEFine CLIENTOpt <Option set Name> DOmain -SYSTEMSATE Force=Yes
Updating *all* clients to the default option set neglects that other option sets may be set, so just doing a upd n * clopt=default will cause trouble. The better way is to update only whose clients, that do not have any client opt set:
SELECT 'UPDate Node ' || node_name || ' CLOpset=Default' FROM nodes WHERE option_set IS NULL
As the option DOMAIN -SYSTEMSTATE is only useful for windows clienst, it might be recommended having twp default rules: one for Windows and one for Linux. To assign all windows-clients to the default windows client option set, the SQL command needs an addition WHERE statement:
SELECT 'UPDate Node ' || node_name || ' CLOptset=Default_Windows' FROM nodes WHERE (option_set IS NULL AND platform_name like 'WinNT%')
As the option DOMAIN -SYSTEMSTATE has no effect but warnings for all non-windows clients all these nodes should have a different Default option set:
SELECT 'UPDate Node ' || node_name || ' CLOptset=Default' FROM nodes WHERE (option_set IS NULL AND NOT platform_name like 'WinNT%')