I've been thinking a lot lately about Retrospect's Selectors.
If you don't know, Selectors are Retrospect's rules-based filters; they select for or against backing up files and/or folders based on criteria set by the user. Selectors can be simple, such as: Exclude files with names that end with ".tmp". They can also be amazingly complex, testing against most any available metadata from the file system, including modification dates and times, path, size, and even old-school Type and Creator codes on the Mac. Selectors can also be nested within other Selectors, which makes it easy to define the building blocks of more complex rules.
Retrospect includes a number of predefined Selectors to fit more common use cases and to help folks get started creating their own. Here are how the predefined All Files Except Cache Files Selectors look in Retrospect 7.6 (Win) and 6.1 (Mac).
The current versions of Retrospect also have a number of predefined "Special Folders" that make it easier for users to employ path-based rules for common folders/directories in their Selectors. A partial list of Retrospect's predefined Special Folders for Macs is displayed on the right.
We're improving the UI for creating and modifying Selectors in the upcoming Retrospect X app (we got started by taking the existing UI out into the woods late one night and shooting it), so that it's much more intuitive. In some ways, defining how Selectors will look and work is the easy part. My preoccupation of late has been the question of what predefined Selectors and Special Folders should we build into Retrospect.
There are certainly some holdovers from the Mac OS 9 and earlier days. (When was the last time you cared about a Control Strip Module?) Mac OS X is much better at providing specific locations for temp, cache, etc. files, and that makes our job a little easier. It used to be that we had to hunt all over the place for cache files belonging to different browsers and painstakingly add rules for them to Retrospect's built-in Selectors. That was never fun.
While we're thinking about this kind of stuff, it's a great time for you to chime in with your own needs and ideas. Let us know what built-in Selectors and Special Folders you need to see. Then, when we're farther along, I'll post the lists of both to the blog for comments.
-Eric
If you saw the early screenshots of Retrospect X that I posted a couple of months ago, you likely noticed our placeholder icons. As a UI element, icons play a huge role in Mac apps. Finder icons in Leopard scale up to 512x512 pixels, and even toolbar icons can be gorgeous.
