Rsync: Combining Includes and Excludes (Shallow Thoughts)

Rsync: Combining Includes and Excludes

I back up my computer to a local disk (well, several redundant local disks) using rsync. (I don't particularly trust cloud providers, and in any case our internet connection is very slow, especially for upload, so waiting hours while the entire contents of my disk uploads isn't appealing.)

To save space and time, I have script that includes a list of files and directories I don't need to back up: browser cache directories, object files, build directories, generated files like thumbnails, large video files, downloaded source, and so on.

I also have a list of files I do want to back up even though they'd otherwise be excluded. For instance, I sometimes have local changes in my GIMP source directory, outsrc/gimp-master/gimp/, even though most of outsrc doesn't need to be backed up. Or /blog/tags/build in my local mirror of the shallowsky website, even though I have a rule that says directories named build shouldn't usually be backed up.

I've been using rsync's --include and --exclude to handle this. But I discovered yesterday that I'd been using them wrong, and some things I thought were getting backed up, weren't. It took some reading and experimenting before I figured out how these rsync flags actually work — which doesn't seem to be well explained anywhere.

Read more ...