A great deal of Akeeba Backup's flexibility springs from the rich filters system. In short, a filter defines what goes in the backup archive and what does not.
Smart aplication of filters can produce highly customized backup sets, allowing - for example - the production of site templates off a master template site. Filters are saved along with all the backup profile's settings. Because Akeeba Backup allows the existence of several backup profiles you are not limited to the same type of backup all the time.
The currently available filters are:
- Filesystem Filters of a specific directory.. These filters force individually selected files or directories to be excluded from the backup set, as if they were never there. Further to that, they can be adjusted to skip over the subdirectories and/or included files Useful for excluding large media files & folders, or removing non-Joomla! PHP applications' directories. They can also be used to subset your site by removing extensions' directories & files!
- Database Table Filters. They allow the contents or the entirety (data and structure) of selected tables to be omitted from the backup set. If you host multiple Joomla! sites and / or other PHP applications in the same physical database, Akeeba Backup makes this even easier for you with single click exclusion of the tables not belonging to your site. In case you have large data sets (e.g. millions of rows of click tracking) you can include the table's structure, but skip its data.
- PROFESSIONAL Regular Expressions (PCRE) filters. The point and click interface is convenient for the occasional user, but simply impractical when you want to exclude dozens of items, e.g. all .svn directories, a dozen hundrend of .mp4 files scattered in various directories, or all non-Joomla! tables in an ever-changing database. With Regular Expressions filters you can exclude an infinite number of items with a single line. The documentation comes with "recipies" which will get you up to speed with those filters.
- PROFESSIONAL Multiple Database Definitions. Ever had a site which relied on more than one physical database? Sometimes web masters prefer to keep - for instance - their Joomla! site and their forum data in different physical databases. Akeeba Backup makes it extremely easy to add these 'extra' databases to your backup set.
- PROFESSIONAL Off-site Directory Inclusion. Include arbitrary directories in the backup set, even if they are above your site's root. Extremely useful for backing up galleries, download repositories and such.
- PROFESSIONAL Single-click extension exclusion. Exclude components, plugins, modules, templates or languages with a single click! The ultimate feature for professional web developers: you can create a single site with everything installed, creating derivative (custom) sites in a few clicks!
To make it even better, all these filters are operated with a graphical, AJAX-powered interface! It's all accomplished in a dead simple point-and-click fashion. If you can use Windows Explorer you can use the filter definition pages. If this is not enough, just switch to tabular view for easy editing, removing or adding filter definitions!
Akeeba Backup comes with an extensible filter API, supporting advanced filters. If you are interested in developing such filters, or want to discuss the possibility of us developing something like that for you, you can contact user nicholas at the support forum by sending him a PM.
Note: Akeeba Backup automatically applies necessary filesystem filters on Joomla!'s own temporary and cache files, without user intervention.
