we are using amanda for doing backups at the company I work for. This worked fairly well for long time, but for various reasons the time for a backup run to complete grew quite large in the last few months. Unfortunately I cannot redistribute the data freely at the moment, so the load on the storage is quite high. The idea came up to give users the power to exclude directories from backups on their own, e.g. by touching a file like '.nobackup', or something similar.
Alas, we can't define a folder inside the directories in question that will never be backed up, as this would interfere with the user's workflow.
So far I failed to see a simple solution with amanda that would not resort to letting users somehow define their own dumptype.
Has anybody come across a solution to this?