zelta backup avoid empty snapshots

[leonardorame]

Hi!, is there a way to tell zelta backup to avoid 0 byte snapshots?. I backup a large pool containing virtual machines that most of the time are powered off, generating empty snapshots.

[bellhyve]

Zelta's default mode on (on the main branch) is the snapshot mode IF_NEEDED, which doesn't take snapshots if no data has been written (the older versions do something similar by running via zelta sync). Unfortunately it'll take snapshots recursively for the whole tree you specify if any data has changed (if we don't snapshot recursively, it can block other sync styles and cause performance problems).

You might be a good candidate for using zelta policy to break the backup job into separate trees that need slightly different settings, along with the --exclude option which accepts patterns.