Changing the file/folder selection mechanism

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Changing the file/folder selection mechanism

(18 posts) (14 voices)

Started 2 years ago by stefan
Latest reply from Iversoner

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stefan
Key Master

I've gotten feedback from several folks that the current mechanism for selecting what to back up is cumbersome.
I'm thinking about changing it to a tree mirroring your computer's directory structure, with a checkbox next to each item, combined with a list of excludes that adds an overlay onto the tree of checkboxes. For instance, if you exclude items named "build", in the tree of checkboxes all the items named "build" would have a line through them.

So, instead of multiple folders showing up on the left side of the main window, there would only be 1. Likewise there would be 1 list of backup versions. If you select a backup version, you can view what was selected at that time for backup.

What's your opinion on this? Do you like the way it is now? Would you like a tree of checkboxes with excludes? Something else?

- Stefan

Posted 2 years ago #
rgrove
Member

Yes please! The cumbersome exclusion UI is by far my biggest complaint about Arq. Not that I have many complaints. But that one's huge.

Posted 2 years ago #
davidcollantes
Member

Hard to visualize, and I have no problem with the current implementation: it is simple, neat, it works. Can you come up with a mockup illustrating your thought?

The only exclusion I am using is for .DS_Store, which isn't complicated at all to create.

Posted 2 years ago #
alan
Member

That sounds like a great improvement. That's the only part of the app where I gaze wistfully sometimes, hoping it might improve.

Posted 2 years ago #
frjo
Member

I have not found the current implementation cumbersome or irritating. Simple and straight forward rather.

Some mockup illustrations would be interesting to see.

Posted 2 years ago #
rgrove
Member

The current exclusion UI is extremely cumbersome when you want to back up a large directory or an entire filesystem, but also need to exclude a lot of specific files or directories (not just all files of a certain type). This currently requires manually adding every file or directory you want to exclude, and is very prone to error since you don't know whether your exclusions match correctly until you actually run a backup.

A simple treeview with a checkbox next to each item, as stefan described, would allow me to check a root folder, then expand it and uncheck specific files and folders under it that I wanted to exclude. For those who prefer rule-based exclusions, files and folders that are excluded due to rule matches would be indicated with a strikethrough line.

Posted 2 years ago #
davidcollantes
Member

@rgrove, I see. Perhaps that is why it isn't cumbersome for me. I keep the things I want to backup on a very clean, pre-defined structure.

Whatever you do, Stefan, keep it to look the Mac OS X way (simplicity, flow, and beauty)!

Posted 2 years ago #
OrangeGuutan
Member

This sound like the selective sync UI of Dropbox? If so, I think it'd probably be more intuitive and less cumbersome to the user. That said, I'd rather you work on more important issues with Arq like actually enforcing the user defined S3 storage budget.

Posted 2 years ago #
stefan
Key Master

> This sound like the selective sync UI of Dropbox? If so, I think it'd probably be more intuitive and less cumbersome to the user.

Yes, probably exactly like that. I was thinking of something like Crashplan's UI, but Dropbox's is nicer.
But there'd be a separate "excludes" editor next to it that applies to that tree. So excluding name='build' would cause everything named 'build' to get a strikethrough line in the tree and be excluded from the backup.

> That said, I'd rather you work on more important issues with Arq like actually enforcing the user defined S3 storage budget.

Will do :)

Posted 2 years ago #
pohutukawa
Member

This sounds exactly like what the Carbon Copy Cloner is using. It works well IMO.

Posted 2 years ago #
parkersweb
Member

Most of what I'm backing up is network drives rather than local folders. Jungle Disk also had a similar selective folder structure - but IMO it made the interface really cluttered (I don't back anything of my laptop up to AWS) and made adding network drives clumsy. So one of the attractions of Arq was the ability to simply add a folder from anywhere in a nice clean interface.

That said - as I'm in the process of backing up a very large quantity of data up to AWS at the moment - which inevitable means several sittings, the ability to separate the versions from the backup set might be nice :-)

Posted 2 years ago #
lgreer
Member

Hey Stefan,

Great work on Arq.

As for the backup selection, I personally like the Spotlight to select/deselect backup items. So as long as that feature stays, I'm happy with the addition of checkboxes.

Also, I *love* your announcement from Appstorm:

Also, I'm planning an iPhone/iPad app for viewing your Arq backups, emailing files from the backups, and making a public-readable, decrypted copy of files/folders in your backups so you can email a link to friends.

I would prefer the implementations of these features before a check-box tree.

Posted 2 years ago #
Creed Erickson
Member

I find the current selection mechanism to be simple enough, although I tend to be thinking in terms of directory trees when approaching this setup. The current exclude mechanism is somewhat more powerful than what you seem to be proposing, in that I can exclude all paths with the word "junk" in them as opposed to hunting down those folders in the UI and individually excluding each.

Posted 2 years ago #
stefan
Key Master

@Creed,
I was thinking the checkboxes thing *plus* a set of excludes. So you could still exclude everything containing the word "junk".

Posted 2 years ago #
Docproc
Member

Another vote for this - as a new user I found the exclusion mechanism very non-intuitive, and even now that I've got the hang of it I still have to think about the difference between "Name" and "Relative Path".

Glenn.

Posted 2 years ago #
julian
Member

Perhaps a power user feature of two regexes (include and exclude)? With an option to get a listing of exactly which files and directories are going to be included/excluded from the backup.

I must admit I'm not exactly fond of the current exclusion mechanism. Sorry.

Posted 2 years ago #
vivo
Member

that would really be the features that sells Arq for me

Posted 2 years ago #
Iversoner
Member

That said - as I'm in the process of backing up a very large quantity of data up to AWS at the moment - which inevitable means several sittings, the ability to separate the versions from the backup set might be nice :-)

Thanks
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Posted 1 year ago #

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