Your computer contains many types of files. The types of files could range from simple text files to word processing files, spreadsheets, pictures, projects, music, video files and so on.


When the software is run for the first time, it will perform data compression and data deduplication on all the files in your protection plan and build an index so that the current and subsequent plan runs will perform the best data reduction possible.


Some file formats do not compress well and the contents of the file are fixed, that is, the file itself will probably not change. Examples of these kinds of files are music and audio files, video files, photographs and images (pictures, etc.), compressed files, and the like. This software will archive all of these files and ensure that these files are only archived once (assuming the file is not changed), but these files could take up a significant amount of space on your disk. If you have collections of music, video, photos that are multi-gigabyte in size you may want to store those files on a second disk and use another disk as your primary storage for your important business type data.


While creating or editing a protection plan you can easily exclude file types from your plan. In the Selections tab you will see a link called, "Exclude File Types . . . "


When you click the link a screen will appear to help you exclude certain file types. There are several categories of file types that can be selected to be excluded from a protection plan. Each of the categories can be expanded by clicking the plus sign.


If you want to exclude all of the Advanced Audio Coding files (.aac) from a particular backup you would use your mouse to click the check box next to that file type. You can exclude all of the Audio file types by using your mouse to click the check box next to the word Audio. When you have completed your choices, click "OK" to return to the "Selections" tab. If you want to exit from the Excludes window without choosing any files to exclude click "Cancel".


If you choose files to exclude from the protection plan, the Selection Summary panel of the Selections tab will update with the number of file types that are excluded.