On Tuesday 08 April 2008 15:16, Jeff Larsen wrote: > On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 5:18 AM, Anne Wilson <cannewilson at 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 is > to 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