Issues Excluding Directories

Need help with rules and settings…

My task was to back up a selection of folders from one hard drive to another. The destination hard drive folder already contained a previous backup and I wanted new files/folders copied to the destination and files/folders no longer part of the source directory removed from the destination.

Settings chosen: Sync; Mirror; Retain Timestamps; Retain Attributes; Ignore Read Only

Questions/Issues:
1. I created a set of rules, but could see from the preview that the rule set to exclude a folder called ProgramFiles was not working, so I created rules for each of the subfolders and files within that folder to be excluded. How would I create a rule in which I would only specify the primary folder, ProgramFiles, as excluded, without having to specify other exclusions? Is there something in the name of my folder that is causing the problem? For other folders containing subfolders, I only needed to specify excluding the top folder.

2. The folders that were to be excluded based on a rule, for example “tobedeleted”, had the folder and the entire subfolder tree (folders only - no files) copied to the destination. Can I create a rule that does not copy unwanted folders to the destination? Additionally, folders that were to be excluded that included read-only files had no-access errors logged during the sync process. Is there a setting to suppress these errors for excluded folders?

3. Did I choose the best settings for my task? The process took approximately 5 hours to complete while the computer was not being used. Two small (