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Fetch
Feature request - Exclude from mirror (37 posts)
- Started 17 years ago by tcdiver7
- Latest reply 13 years ago from Scott McGuire
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tcdiver7 Member
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Scott McGuire Administrator
Hi,
Thanks for the suggestion!
Best,
Scott McGuire
Fetch Softworks -
tcdiver7 Member
You're welcome.
FWIW, even without the ability to exclude certain folders, the mirror function in Fetch is the best thing to ever happen to a FTP client - it alone is worth the price of Fetch.
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Scott McGuire Administrator
Thanks!
--Scott
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captkirk Member
I would request this feature also. I need to backup interactive web sites periodically, and some of the servers I work with have folders of stats files, temp files and all sorts of garbage sprinkled in with my html which causes the Fetch mirror operation to get an error when they are locked.
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Scott McGuire Administrator
Hi captkirk,
Thanks for the feedback.
Best,
Scott McGuire
Fetch Softworks -
captkirk Member
Are there any plans for this? Or just for ignoring files for which I don't have permissions? Seems like the latter would be pretty easy to do, and a error log could be produced so you would know what didn't get downloaded.
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Scott McGuire Administrator
Hi,
We would like to do something along those lines - either exclude folders or ignore and log errors - in the future, but we do not have a schedule for when such a feature might be released.
Thanks,
Scott McGuire
Fetch Softworks -
rjewell679 Member
I know this is an old post, but I wanted to give my vote for this feature as well. In our example we have some folders that change infrequently and take up much of the mirrors time. For instance all our images are in one folder and it takes a long time for the mirror to go through 200,000 product images just to find out they are all the same.
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Jim Matthews Administrator
That's a good point -- excluding some folders could make mirror times much faster. Thanks for that feedback.
Jim Matthews
Fetch Softworks -
James McWhorter Member
Just wanted to throw my hat into the ring and say that this feature would be ... AWESOME! I'm having the same problem as many of the folks in this thread. Other than that this is an awesome product! Keep up the good work!
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Scott McGuire Administrator
Hi James,
Noted - thanks for the feedback!
Best,
Scott McGuire
Fetch Softworks -
mdfOffman Member
I would also like to add my voice to this request - but with a slight tweak. I would like to filter out from the Mirror files with a certain suffix. for example in my doc management system, certain full-text index management files with the suffix .wld make Fetch drop out and nothing after that is mirrored.
Apart from this, Fetch is awesomw, i agree - especially the mirror. Please make it even better :-) -
Scott McGuire Administrator
Hi mdfOffman,
Thanks for the details on how you'd like such a feature to operate. I've added your comments to the notes we're keeping on this subject.
Best,
Scott McGuire
Fetch Softworks -
Dooobus Member
I think this is a definitely needed function in any FTP client :) so please - I'm looking forward to getting Fetch if this is done :)
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Scott McGuire Administrator
Hi Dooobus,
Thanks for the feedback!
Best,
Scott McGuire
Fetch Softworks -
mdfOffman Member
Dear Scott,
You politely reply to all these requests but I note this thread started more than 2 years ago and NOTHING has happened.
I would have expected Fetch to be more concerned about its reputaion with its customers ....
Regards,
Martin -
Scott McGuire Administrator
Dear Martin,
We wish we could implement all the features requested by our customers. However, we cannot do them all, so for each new Fetch release, we have to chose the ones that we feel will be of the most benefit to the most customers.
While there are a number of people - including you and the others who have commented in this thread - that would use a way to exclude files and folders from the Mirror operation, there were far more that benefit from the automatic resume upload feature that we added in Fetch 5.5. So we focused our development effort on that, and the other new features in Fetch 5.5, which we felt would benefit more users.
We do truly appreciate the feedback from you and the other customers, because it gives us a better idea of how our customers use Fetch, and helps us prioritize which features to add. We haven't dismissed the requests for excluding files while mirroring out of hand, because we do believe it's something that would appeal to some of our customers, and because we have received several requests for it, so it is still on the list of things to consider for the future. But I'm sorry to say it hasn't made the cut yet, and we have no estimate for when we might add it to Fetch.
Thanks,
Scott McGuire
Fetch Softworks -
Tony Member
Yes, the option to exclude directories in a mirror would be ideal. In my situation I have a forum, ad server, photo gallery and video directories that are huge, with thousands of files, and don't need to be considered in the mirror (both from and to the server).
Thanks,
Tony -
mdfOffman Member
I am disappointed by Scott's most recent post. This is a thread that has been going on for more than 2 years with several customers supporting it and Scott lists just one higher priority. Has that kept you 100% busy for 2 years, Scott?
Or what else has had a higher priority than this feature that has a unanimous thumbs up from your customers? I'm not planning to replace Fetch with any other FTP app but I would have thought your customers deserve a more courteous and transparent explanation of why you can't accommodate their needs for more than 2 years than "We had one higher priority".
Regards,
Martin
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tcdiver7 Member
Hi. The original poster here.
mdfOffman, you're way off base. You've got to understand that developers can't just wish new features into existence. Personally, I completely understand that time is a finite resource and tough decisions have to be made with feature requests. I also understand that hypothetical work is always easier than actual work. That goes double for coding, where what sounds like a minor tweak has the potential break existing code and turn into a nightmarish time black hole.
Scott has been quite open about this particular feature request: It was and remains a lower priority than other features. That six or seven of us have requested this feature does not necessarily mean that a majority of users want it or would benefit from it, since I'm guessing we're not the only users of Fetch. I take Scott at his word that other features were more important to more users. Frankly, the Fetch team should have a better feel for that than I do as a single user.
So, for now, we've voiced our desire for the exclude from mirror feature. Scott has responded reasonably, telling us that it would indeed be nice but it's not on the menu right now. And that's the end of it for the moment. You don't have to like it, but complaining isn't likely to change it.
As a user, I'd suggest that if this feature is a deal breaker, then use another solution (perhaps rsync from the command line could work for you).
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Scott McGuire Administrator
Tony: Thanks for the feedback and information on why such a feature would be useful to you. As may have read, we do not have a timeframe for implementing such a feature, although it remains under consideration.
tcdiver7: Thanks for your message, and your patience and understanding!
Martin (mdfOffman): Just for the record, I did not say we had only one higher priority. I gave one example, and also said, "we focused our development effort on that, and the other new features in Fetch 5.5." In time period that this topic covers, we have released both Fetch 5.3 and 5.5. In those releases, we added quite a number of new features, as well as updating Fetch with complete support for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and continually working to add or update Fetch's compatibility with the wide range of SFTP and FTP servers that are out there. If you look at the full list of release notes you'll see we've done far more than one thing recently.
Thanks,
Scott McGuire
Fetch Softworks -
mdfOffman Member
Scott:
Thank you. Of course, I did not suggest that you only did one thing. My complaint was that you only offered one higher priority in explanation. I fully accept that there are many other priorities as you now mention. It just seems to me that "filtering" is an integral and fundamental feature of any information management system that shouldn't be too difficult to implement.
However, as I made quite clear before tcdiver7's post, I have no intention of changing to any other FTP provider. It just seems a pity to me that I get the impression that there is no real intention of implementing what seems to me an obvious and important feature any time in the foreseeable future.
Ah, well. I guess we all have our own constraints ...... -
Walt Javins Member
I'll add my support for this feature. With my current web setup, I would like to copy everything from a folder except configuration files that need different values on my local mirror.
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caffee Member
** Chiming in to support a request for this feature too.
I love Fetch. Great Program.The ability to exclude files and directories from mirroring would be a welcomed feature. I'm with the other comments here. A filtering system would greatly speed up my mirror times and prevent the need to separately manage config files between my local development environment and my remote servers.
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Doug Member
I'd like to chime in to request this feature as well. Or at the very least, an option to log and continue when mirroring encounters a permissions error. I have to mirror an FTP share that contains a couple of directories I don't have access to. To accomplish this now, I have to build 9 different mirror files to work around the off-limits directories because when Fetch hits them, it just stops cold. Very inconvenient.
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mdfOffman Member
I'm very, very disappointed that this thread was started THREE YEARS AGO and there is still no indication that Fetch is even giving it any consideration nor any explanation why not. Is this what you call listening to your customers?????
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Jim Matthews Administrator
Hi Doug,
Could you send an email to bugs@fetchsoftworks.com? We may have a workaround that will help in your situation.
Thanks,
Jim Matthews
Fetch Softworks -
captkirk Member
Hey! No secrets! Whatever it is, please let us know! Thanks!
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mdfOffman Member
.... and while you're about it, would you at least tell us WHY you have totally ignored your customers in this thread for 3 years? Fetch is overall such a good program, I presume there must be some reason. And the request seems so obvious, I simply can't understand why you choose simply to ignore it without even justifying it.
Wouldn't you like your customers to feel that you do actually listen to them?
It'd be nice if I could tell Fetch to mirror a folder but exclude certain subfolders within that folder.
I was just about to use Fetch to mirror my Documents on my PowerBook to the wife's iMac for backup purposes and realized that would be a bad idea for some of the folders in Documents given my current setup.
As it stands, I can create an Automator workflow that will upload only the files I want to backup since there's not many of them, but life would be easier with the ability to exclude subfolders from a mirror operation.
Posted 17 years ago #