System files are another example of files that do not usually warrant backup. These files are usually managed by the operating system, most are read only, many are temporary, some are simply too large to deal with. If these files are corrupted, most users do not have the skill to manually repair or reinstall them. Thus, problems created by a corruption of this type would usually require that system components be reloaded from non-volatile media (CD’s or DVD’s, or from the Internet).

There is a default configuration defined that is suitable for most users, but you can easily choose what you want to include and exclude from the Katchall Archive. Katchall Archive is easily configured in a two step configuration process:  
 
First decide which directories you want to exclude from the archive. The default configuration excludes the Windows directory and subdirectories, temp, cookies, etc.  
 
Then you decide which files in files in the non-excluded directories you want to included. You select these files by either the file name, or with just the file extension.   
 
Size constraints are imposed to limit the consumption of archive space. Files over a certain size are not archived. Nor is the archive for a particular file allowed to grow unchecked.

Some file types, e.g. .zip and jpg files, are already compressed. If a zip or jpg file is altered the entire contents of the file will change. This means that there will be little commonality between versions of such a file. Katchall Archive will still archive these files, but it will not do well compressing the differences.

The size of these types of files will grow rapidly in the archive as they are modified. Katchall Archive handles this situation by simply discarding the oldest version of these files when the archive gets too large. Using the same criteria to describe file types as for exclusion you can configure Katchall Archive to quietly truncate these files as needed.

Katchall Archive will inform you when this situation arises so that you can decide how to handle it. The file will be truncated to limit its size and you will be notified each time the file is truncated unless you configure Katchall Archive to do this quietly.