Handy Vista Tip: Exclude files and folders from Backup

Everyone on the net seems to think this is impossible to do... however, they're wrong. You can exclude files and folders from Vista's backup and restore by adding them to the FilesNotToBackup registry key, which lives under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore.

For instance, I don't want to back up my virtual machines for Virtual PC (why back up 4+ GB of stuff that's meant to be ephemeral??), so I added this to my registry:

Name=VirtualPC Value="C:\Users\Aaron Ballman\Documents\My Virtual Machines\*"

That will exclude all files and folders within my virtual machine folder.

For more information about this and some official documentation, see MSDN.