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h2. Question


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When I run a backup, CDP server backs up the entire disk or partition. Is there a way to back up only certain files or folders on a disk or partition?

h2. Answer


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CDP is more technically called asynchronous replication. It is replicating your file system at the block-level in a way that only the changes between recovery points are copied. And those changes are usually known ahead of time making backup windows very short.

If you are using a CDP 3 product edition you can *exclude* selected files and folders from the replication. See [Excluding Files and Folders|http://wiki.r1soft.com/display/CDP3/Excluding+Files+and+Folders] (CDP 3.0 Documentation).

Note that your low level file system formatting or meta data (e.g. NTFS or Ext4) will be replicated. There are also some costs in backup window length when excluding large amounts of files. See [http://www.r1soft.com/windows-cdp/cdp-30-enterprise-edition/features/powerful-file-excludes/].

So if you simply want to protect a small subset of files (perhaps a desktop) using CDP will probably be an overkill.
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