Exclude USB drives from being scanned

[William B]

I have been scouring the internet to find a way to tell scanstate to ignore
all local drives drives except C:, aka External USB/Firewire drives. We have
many users who have massive external drives with tons of data on them and
scanstate can take up to and sometime over an hour to complete. With this
being a drive that is not going to be touched as part of my migration I have
to believe that there is a way to stop it from being scanned?

Thanks!

[mawi2000]

Technically, the "/localonly" switch is supposed to shut this down, as from
the , Technet info
<http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749015.aspx>. However, in
certain cases this may not work:

"/localonly
Migrates only files that are stored on the local computer, regardless of
the rules in the .xml files that you specify on the command line. You should
use this option when you want to exclude the data from external drives on the
source computer (USB flash drives, external hard drives, and so on) and when
there are network drives mapped on the source computer. If /localonly is not
specified, then ScanState will copy files from these drives into the store.

Note
The data located on external USB hard disks will be migrated even when you
specify /localonly."

[JR--]

mawi2000 is correct - /localonly really only works for network/ mapped
drives -

One thing you can do to help reduce this pain would be to modify the
migration rules in miguser.xml -

<script>MigXmlHelper.GenerateDrivePatterns ("*
[*.pub]", "Fixed")</script>

Try changing rule to something like this

<pattern type="File">c:\* [*.pub]</pattern>

[mawi2000]

And further, you can place an explicit unconditional exclusion in your
customized file something akin to:

<!-- This section will exclude anything on an E or F drive -->
<component type="Documents" context="System">
<displayName>Exclude Extraneous Drives</displayName>
<role role="Data">
<rules>
<unconditionalExclude>
<objectSet>
<pattern type="File">e:\* [*]</pattern>
<pattern type="File">f:\* [*]</pattern>
</objectSet>
</unconditionalExclude>
</rules>
</role>
</component>

The caveats:
1. Make sure you enumerate each possible drive letter. In some environments,
this is normalized, but in others, a user might name the drive any letter
they wish.
2. Make sure that you place it within System context, or it will still eat
up cycles.

--Mawi2k