In article <52FE23C4.50101 at gmail.com>, Joseph Hesse <joehesse at 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 -- Tony Mountifield Work: tony at softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk Play: tony at mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org