In article 52FE23C4.50101@gmail.com, Joseph Hesse joehesse@gmail.com wrote:
I use an external USB drive and rsync to back up everything in /home. The USB drive has an entry in fstab and I mount it with "# mount /mnt" The rsync command I use is:
rsync -av --delete --include='.thunderbird' --include='.filezilla' --include='.putty' \ --exclude='.*' --exclude='Desktop' --exclude='VirtualBox*' /home/* /mnt/home/
After I deleted one of the users on my system, including their home directory, I ran the rsync command. I found that the deleted user's home directory wasn't deleted from /mnt/home. I thought that the --delete option deleted everything on the destination that was not on the source.
If you had specified /home/ instead of /home/* it would have done so.
If you originally had users fred, joe and mary on the system, your previous rsyncs would have said ... /home/fred /home/joe /home/mary /mnt/home/
Then when you deleted joe, your rsync says ... /home/fred /home/mary /mnt/home/ so it doesn't even consider /home/joe on the target.
If you do change it, make sure you say /home/ and not /home
Hope this helps! Tony