In configuring our search service, we have set up a content source of \\server\projects. Within this source is a directory, \\server\projects\~backups. This backup directory contains hourly, daily, weekly and monthly snapshots of our project data. Our source contains over 500GB of legitimate project files (excluding ~backups, which pushes the total disk space into many terabytes of storage).
I want to ensure that the crawl excludes the ~backups directory. It seems I have two options:
Create a source that enumerates all subdirectories of \\server\projects:
- \\server\projects\projectA
- \\server\projects\projectB (and so on)
Create a source of file://server/projects and create a crawl rule to exclude file://server/projects/~backup.
However, reading the documentation for crawl rules says pretty explicitly that they are for http:// sources only. I'm not sure if I should read that in as "urls in general" as opposed to LoB data, and Exchange Public Folder data, though. I'm a bit gunshy of starting another crawl with these rules because it will take many hours to complete the crawl.
Will the search service honor a file:// exclusion or will I need to use a list of subdirectories?
