Excluding files with specific extensions – new feature

UpdraftPlus already has various features allowing you to exclude particular files or folders from your backup set. These include:

• Exclude specific files or folders by listing them in the ‘exclude these’ settings in your settings.
• Exclude top-level files/folders with a wildcard, in the same settings fields (e.g. “*tmp” to exclude any file/directory ending with tmp).
• Exclude an entire directory by creating a file called “.donotbackup” (without the quotes) within it.

Our next release, responding to a customer request, will have another one: the ability to exclude files with a specific extensions, regardless of where those files are.

You can do this in two ways. The easiest is to add it to an ‘exclude’ these setting. To do so, just prefix your extension with “ext:” (without the quotes). You can list as many as you like; for example, “ext:zip,ext:mp4” to exclude any files with a .zip or .mp4 extension, as in this screenshot:

The second is for advanced users; you can define a value for the constant UPDRAFTPLUS_EXCLUDE_EXTENSIONS in your wp-config.php. Example doing the same as the above:

define('UPDRAFTPLUS_EXCLUDE_EXTENSIONS', 'zip,mp4');

David Anderson (founder, lead developer, UpdraftPlus)