Backup forum

Recently I purchased the 25 user / 25TB storage IDrive Team tier as on a monthly cost / storage available it blew away our old grandfathered Carbonite plan (limited to 300gb / unlimited computers).

As with all new things, there is a learning curve.  What surprised me was the lack of information, other than the IDrive FAQ, out there about this product.  So, in an effort to help those that come behind me, I'm going to try to document what I've been able to figure out so far and anything in the future.

Our environment:
Typical Windows Shop with an Active Directory Domain, Office 365 email and Network shares.
Primary reason for IDrive is to backup our engineering users and remote Sales Teams.
All systems have  Hard drives with 500gb or less of storage, typically with 256GB.

The desire is to set the backup for the users Desktop and c:\users\<username>\appdata and for engineering all relevant data directories via the IDrive Web Dashboard - Policy option

General lessons:
Capitalization matters when working with the Include Files/Folders  and the Exclude Files / Folders
The only way to get a users hidden APPDATA without having to manually assign it or

Lesson #1
To backup the entire C:\ as a Dashboard Policy, create a new policy, uncheck all the defaults in the "Backup Content" tab, "Add Folder" and enter in C:\
In backing up the entire C:\, it's going to take quite awhile on an existing system that has been in use.

Which leads me to
Lesson #2
Excluding files and folders from the Web Dashboard - Settings - Policy settings specifically says Exclude files / folders from being backed up, based on their partial names, from your computer. and what that means is that entering in any specific paths will not work.
E.G.  In the Exclude portion of the Policy settings dashboard, if you want to exclude C:\Program Files (x86),  you must enter it in as   Program Files (x86)  without the Drive letter and capitalized correctly.


Lesson #3
Suggested Files and Folders to exclude in a policy for Windows 10 (so far as of 7/27/2021)
Files:
*.iso  - We store Install Iso files on the network
*.pst - Our email is Office 365 so there is no need to backup the *.pst or *.ost files
*.ost
pagefile.sys
hiberfil.sys
swapfile.sys

Folders:
Program Files
Program Files (x86)
Temp
temp
Recovery
<other various cloud based services specific folders>