by Séverin Terrier.
Hi Ken,
About the ability to exclude some courses from automatic backups, i created MDL-60296 some years ago. And provided some lines of code to do it (just a hack, hard coded).
The code in backup/util/helper/backup_cron_helper.class.php is pretty good i think, but it would need a real clean solution with a dedicated admin option to define courses to avoid via UI.
It as been closed as won't do by inactivity, but had some votes. Perhaps it would be useful to comment on it, and perhaps reopen it...