Adjust your backup preferences
Michael Terry

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 Unported License

# Preferences

To review your backup preferences, press the menu button in the top-right corner of the window and select Preferences.

# Storage location

The storage location is where Déjà Dup will put its copies of your files so that they can be restored later.

Note that backups can be quite large, so make sure you have enough free disk space.

If you'd like to use an external drive as a storage location, plug it in and it will show up in the list.

While you can choose a local folder for your backups, this is not recommended. If your hardware fails, you will lose both your original data and your backups all at once.

# Keep Backups

Choose the minimum amount of time to keep backup files. If you find that the backup files are taking up too much space, you may want to decrease this duration. Due to implementation details, files may be kept a bit longer than the chosen time. But no files will be deleted early.

Backups are kept forever by default, but still may be deleted earlier if the storage location begins to run out of space.

# Back Up Automatically

Turn this option on to have Déjà Dup automatically back up for you. This is recommended so that you don’t forget to do it yourself. Backups are more useful the more recent they are, so it is important to back up regularly.

# Folders to Back Up

Choose a list of folders to save in your backup. Press the Add or Remove buttons to modify the list. If you are only interested in backing up your own data, the default of Home is sufficient.

# Folders to Ignore

Choose a list of folders to not save in your backup. Press the Add or Remove buttons to modify the list.

Some of your data may be large and not very important to you. In that case, you can save yourself some time and space by not backing them up.

Some locations are always ignored by default:

~/.adobe/Flash_Player/AssetCache

~/.cache

~/.ccache

~/.gvfs

~/.Private

~/.recent-applications.xbel

~/.recently-used.xbel

~/.steam/root (which by default also ignores ~/.local/share/Steam)

~/.thumbnails

~/.var/app/*/cache

~/.xsession-errors

~/snap/*/*/.cache

/dev

/proc

/run

/sys

/tmp

Any folder with a CACHEDIR.TAG or .deja-dup-ignore file in it.