On a site I succesfully was able to use a symbolic link to give the website access to a folder with data from a complete other area of the harddisk.
This data is not added to the back-up.
That was to be expected and, for me, a good thing.
I can make use of that if hosting in fact stopped for that site, but I want to keep its data for a while.
By replacing the httpdocs folder with a symbolic link I can keep that site out of the back-up.
I recently started to use that trick for the folders in /var/qmail/mailnames/
But after examining the data in the back-up I found out that those symbolic links are followed anyhow.
I'm now doing a new test.
I'm not replacing the domain name folder with a symbolic link, but I'm replacing all the subfolders of the users with a symbolic link.
Hopefully they will not get backupped then.
Otherwise I will just move the folders and not create the symbolic links.
If I need to resurrect their mail, I merely need to create a symbolic link.
This data is not added to the back-up.
That was to be expected and, for me, a good thing.
I can make use of that if hosting in fact stopped for that site, but I want to keep its data for a while.
By replacing the httpdocs folder with a symbolic link I can keep that site out of the back-up.
I recently started to use that trick for the folders in /var/qmail/mailnames/
But after examining the data in the back-up I found out that those symbolic links are followed anyhow.
I'm now doing a new test.
I'm not replacing the domain name folder with a symbolic link, but I'm replacing all the subfolders of the users with a symbolic link.
Hopefully they will not get backupped then.
Otherwise I will just move the folders and not create the symbolic links.
If I need to resurrect their mail, I merely need to create a symbolic link.