On Tuesday 08 April 2008 15:16, Jeff Larsen wrote:
On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 5:18 AM, Anne Wilson cannewilson@googlemail.com
wrote:
I run several backup scripts by cron, one of which backs up my mail. I do not want it to back up the Trash folder, but it appears to be doing so. I conclude that my script is faulty somewhere, and would be grateful for advice.
The command is
rsync -auvz --delete-after --exclude-from=/home/anne/rsync_skiplist_mail.txt /home/anne/Maildir/ /Data3/anne/Maildir/
where rsync_skiplist_mail.txt says
*~ .[a-z]* .[A-Z]* Maildir/.INBOX.Bugs/ Maildir/.Trash/
Comments, please?
I've always found exclude patterns to be a trial and error process, mostly errors. They never seem to do what you think they will. As a starting point, I would try putting a / in from of the Maildir patterns and put ** at the end of them.
From "man rsync" (sorry, I know you're a CentOS list regular and have
probably read the man page, but sometimes the relevant text fails to stand out):
The easiest way to see what name you should include/exclude isto just look at the output when using --verbose and put a / in front of the name (use the --dry- run option if you're not yet ready to copy any files).
I think this is one of the weakest features of rsync. I wish they would implement something that would generate more predictable outcomes.
--dry-run with --verbose proved informative. My pattern matching was excluding most of them, so I wasn't getting the backup I thought I was. It looks as though that particular exclude file should be only
Maildir/.INBOX.Bugs/ Maildir/.Trash/
Thanks for pointing me to the solution.
Anne