Global Filters are exclusions that can be set to filter out data from data protection operations on all agents of a certain type. This is useful in cases where certain files, folders or entities
need to be excluded from data protection operations.Global Filters can be configured as follows:
- CommNet level to easily and quickly exclude data from data protection operations on multiple CommCells at once.
- CommCell level to exclude data from data protection operations on all clients residing within the CommCell.
CommNet Global Filters represent the top-level of a filtering hierarchy such that filters defined at the CommNet level can be propagated downward to CommCells within a CommNet domain, which can then be propagated down to specified subclients on those CommCells. The inheritance of Global Filters by subordinate objects within the filtering hierarchy is illustrated in the simple image.
For example, Company A decided to save money on storage and reduce the backup window by not backing up a folder commonly found on computers in their organization called C:\temp. To accomplish this goal using Global Filters, that path was specified as an exclusion filter entry in CommNet, then the Global Filters were enabled on each CommCell in the CommNet domain, and enabled on each file system subclient for those CommCells so that the CommNet filter entry was inherited by the selected CommCells and subclients. Using this approach, typing in that filter path for 100 subclients across 10 CommCells can be avoided. Also, the next time backups were run for those subclients it took less time and fewer tapes because C:\temp was successfully filtered out of the backups.
Global Filters are configured separately for each agent type both at the CommNet and CommServe level, and support the use of regular expressions (or wildcards).
To set up global filters for CommCell, use the Control Panel from the Tools menu on CommCell console.