In the “Files” section of backup policy there’s “Ignore Well-Known Cache Directories” setting. Which directories are those? Nothing is mentioned in Ignoring Files and Folders in Snapshots | Kopia or elsewhere in the documentation.
Also in the UI and documentation it would be nice to explicitly call out that Kopia wants / (linux style) as directory separators, not \ (windows style). This took me a bit to figure out why my backups were failing when I tried to exclude some dirs.
Hi @Mxx,
what is basically meant here is to ignore your well known cache directories. In case you have a programm which generates a cache or cache files (e.g. latex) you can ignore these file types or directories.
Kopia itself also uses a cache that might be ignored.
Cheers,
But what are those programs? Where’s the list? What kind of directories? What kind of file types? I want to understand that list to know if Kopia might be skipping something that I DO want backed up…
I’m not a programmer in Go, but I tried searching in the source code on github and haven’t found where such “well-known cache directories” are listed or defined.
Is this just a dummy checkbox and there’s nothing behind it?
Hi,
you can specify it by yourself. You can ignore files and folders that you specify simply by adding ignore rules in the policy.
There is no predefined list in the code 
If you got further questions, feel free to ask.
Cheers,
I don’t understand.
If I specify the files and dirs I want ignored, then what’s the point of “Ignore Well-Known Cache Directories” setting?
My understanding is that it’s supposed to have a list of “well known” cache directories and ignore them to save me the time of manually entering them… Is that not the case?
Hi @Mxx,
okay got it. This setting ignores directories that contain the CACHEDIR.TAG file. This file, for example, is contained in the cache directories of Kopia itself.
I’ve not used this setting so far. We probably need to extend the documentation here.
Cheers,
