Exclude option does not work

I have Paragon Backup & Restore (Advanced) Free Ver 10.0.15.12802 running under 64-bit Win 7 professional SP1.

I have been trying to back up my main HD but with certain folders excluded. Many of these folders include sub-folders and sub-sub-folders. In this forum link a moderator states categorically that it will "exclude sub-files and folders". (Although I do note that the particular version being discussed is not clear.)

I have tried backing up my hard drive (about115GB of files on a 1TB disk) and it fails every time to exclude folders. As the final part of the 4 filters that I constructed I have tried using * or *.* or even nothing at all and I always obtain the same size archive of about 96GB. Looking at the contents using Restore I can see that none of the folders and the files in them have been excluded. I might add that the final page before the backup starts says that 39 folders are going to be excluded.

Can ver 10 actually exclude folders and sub-folders and, if not, why does it wrongly say that it is going to exclude them?

 

I asked the same question from Paragon support and received the following replay:

The excluded folders and sub folders will be added as empty folders in the archive without any contents (size is kept, but there are no content in folders and files).

 

Thanks for the reply but I've just checked again under Restore and there are files listed under the sub-folders.

I've discovered another recent thread on this topic so it looks like there is a problem. The final post on this thread suggests that sub-folders can not be excluded which is in direct contradiction to what the poster in my first link said. There is also the fact that the page before the backup starts definitely states that the selected folders will be excluded.

 

i also experimented with this briefly, and found that only the files in the specified top-level folders will be excluded, but not files in any subfolders.

this would be an excellent feature to add.