Allow user to change backup blend extension (.blend1, .blend2, etc) for ease of cleanup/backup
<TLDR bit>
Could there perhaps be an option for a user to either change the extension that blender applies to incremental backup files? The default is fine, but it would be amazingly useful to be able to modify it.
It can be a problem to set up search terms like
*.blend AND NOT *.blend1 AND NOT *.blend2 AND NOT *.blend3
(...) and have them actually work right.
</TLDR bit>
Basically, the fact that ".blend" is a substring of "blend1" and so on adds extra difficulty to the process of cleanup, backup, and others. Usually when backing up the directory in which a bunch of blend files live, you don't want to back up a zillion ".blendX" files as well. Also, it is good practice to occasionally clear out all of the old backup blends, especially of projects that are done, because they pile up and use a massive amount of space.
Specifying whitelists or blacklists would be a lot easier if it was possible for a user to change the default extension to something that was not a substring (or had a union with) ".blend" if they needed to. I can see why the current naming scheme is the default, but it would make life a lot easier if you could, say, have incremental backup files named "*.bak_blend1" or something.
6 Comments
I'm not sure why there's an issue here. It's not like it's difficult to do a simple regex for
.blendfollowed by a number. In bash it's as simple as*.blend?and as a "proper" regex, it'd be something like.blend\d(of course, these don't account when you have more than 9 backup files, but that's relatively easy to cover as well.* @Jason van Gumster *
Assuming you are using Linux. The search function in Windows doesn't support anything like that as far as I've been able to determine, and nor do backopy/copy utilities like robocopy. Everything I have access to considers "foo.blend" to be a match for " .blend?" and " .blend*". Allowing a wildcard to match a zero length substring seems to be pretty common, at least over on the Windows side.
* @maekern * You can do it in Windows with the Advanced Query Syntax . Try
"*.blend*" name:=(NOT "*.blend").Of course, it's much easier with PowerShell or WSL in Windows, but if you want to just use the Search function in Explorer, it's still possible.
* @Jason van Gumster * As far as I know there is no way to exclude " .blend" from a search that won't also exclude ".blend1" etc. The only way seems to be to create a search for " .blend1 OR *.blend2 OR *.blend3" and so on, for however many backups you have set for Blender to make.
Even if there are ways to wrangle around the issue with the OS to accomplish the same thing (and I know this is not a forum for windows tech support! :) ) it seemed like fairly basic functionality to me. But if the backup file extension isn't sufficiently abstracted out to be worth the time of devs to make it user-editable, then I guess it's better to spend dev-hours on stuff that matters more.
Thanks for having responded.
* @maekern * I don't understand. The search text I wrote does exactly that. I even tried it on a Windows machine I had access to and it worked fine there.
* @Jason van Gumster * (whoops. I keep forgetting that this forum doesn't email me notifications)
Well, you are completely right; That works just fine. I didn't realize windows search supported that, and I shouldn't have relied on "knowing" that it didn't. I'm sorry for wasting your time. Thank you for the information.