create symbolic link to a directory excluding certain file types

Combat squirrel

Combat squirrel

Combat squirrel

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As title, I am wanting to create a symbolic link to a directory excluding certain file types in windows 2012 r2.

Reason being is I have 2 cloud accounts, I want one to back up photos and the other to back up video, but the files are all mixed up (hundreds of thousands).

Basically I was wondering if it was possible to create a symbolic link directory(s) that for example one will only show '*.cr2' files and the other '*.mp4, .mov' etc

I would want to end up with 2 'folders' one 'pictures' and other 'video' but they appear as a local directory on C:\ and obviously only end up showing the appropriate file types both reading from a master directory on a network drive.

Thanks all
 
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Pretty sure you can't do this.

With most cloud providers (I'm sure you can with Dropbox anyway) can't you filter them by particular extensions? E.g., exclude cr2 from provider A and exclude mp4, mov etc from provider B - so you can point them at your root folder and have them filter the files themselves?
 
As above, pretty sure that isn't possible with symbolic links.

Any reason why you can't just use something like CrashPlan (~£3.40 a month, $5.99) and dump it all on there, in one place?
 
Ones Amazon Cloud drive & I cannot see how to exclude certain file types in its software.

I do have crashplan but I want to take advantage of Amazons upload speed - crash plan is deathly slow and were talking double figure TB's
 
From a quick Google it looks like Amazon don't easily let you do that like you say :(.

Do you have enough disk space to robocopy all the images and videos to separate folders and then point Amazon/Crashplan at the respective mirrored folder? Having another local copy isn't exactly a bad thing. My photos have three copies locally (three disks) and are backed up to two external drives also :D.
 
You could give Backblaze a try? Apparently their upload speeds are better. It's a shame you can't pre-define a search for a folder in Windows, now that'd be a cool feature!

Local copy as Pho said might work nicely. You get get yourself a couple of external drives (one for each cloud service), then back your files up to those and those get backed up to Amazon etc.
 
Yeah as you mentioned chaps I think my only option would be to search pictures only and copy - my only issue is each folder contains photos and video from said event arranged in date/month/year order so just pulling the image files would dump ~1/4-1/2 million image files in one place (not even sure how many, many years of work), of which several thousand will be the same file name (Canon camera names them 0001 to 9999) so iv rolled round that many times, which isnt an issue as they are in sep folders now but large scale copy would run into problems.

I already do have 3 local copies and 1 off site copy and 2 cloud accounts. However the total amount is some 15TB's currently for essential stuff, so my local copies are 2x UnRaid arrays & the final copies are just several 4tb drives with the data directly copied on then stored in a fire proof safe.
 
Ouch. I've got ~180GB of photos which is an entirely different scale compared to yours.

This robocopy command should mirror everything in c:\source to d:\backup excluding mov and mp4's. It should also respect your directory structure and include subfolders:

Code: 
robocopy c:\source d:\backup /MIR /XF *.mov *.mp4

Obviously backup things before testing :p
 
On a sort of related note - was pulling apart some older PCs earlier in the week - some of which were stuck on their default date/time (like 1970s or something) and was slightly amused to see when searching for files that they were grouped under "Some time in the future".
 
Pho has listed the best way of doing it.


Create a test folder with sample data in it first..

ie..

C:\Test-source
C:\Test-pics
C:\Test-video

robocopy "C:\Test-source" "C:\Test-pics" /MIR /XF *.mov *.mp4 *.avi *.mpg *.mkv

This would copy all files besides those video types to that Test-pics folder and recreate the folder structure.



robocopy "C:\Test-source" "C:\Test-video" /MIR /XF *.jpg *.bmp *.png *.tiff

This would do the same, but it would ignore the specified picture filetypes.

NB..

Play around with using /E instead of /MIR. If you used /E, you could run that command on a new source that only contained new files and it will apply the same rules to them dumping them into the destination folder.

If you had /MIR and used it on a new source, it would clear out all files at the destination (files that don't exist in the new source would be deleted).
 
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