I'm using rsync as part of a system to create nightly snapshots of several servers, much like several people are appearently doing. However, I have a bit of a problem with things that I don't want backed up. On most of the systems, things like devfs, procfs, sysfs, etc don't need backed up. In addition, I have directories from one server NFS mounted on several of the other servers - specifically /home, among others.
My backup scheme is currently that the backup server initiates the connection, and pulls the current state. As I'm already doing this over ssh, one possible solution is to have my script ssh in to the remote machine, parse the output of `mount`, and generate an include or exclude list from that. However, from reading the way the inc/exclude lists work, if someone happens to have made a directory named dev, for example, then it'll be excluded from the backups, since the list appears to be reapplied at each deeper stage in the directory traversal. Potentially, I could change the backup structure so that I back up each individual filesystem into a separate directory, and use "rsync -x" for each mountpoint. That gives me an ugly backup tree, though. My whole point is that I want a complete copy of each server that can easily be restored to an arbitrary machine. So, what I'm looking for is possibly a way to make excludes relative to the root at the beginning of the operation - so that if I specify "rsync --exclude /dev host:/ /backup/host", only /dev on host is excluded, not /home/user/dev, etc. Alternatively, it'd be great if I could specify a command line argument that listed just the fstypes to include (or exclude). Alternatively, is it possible to set up an rsync server on each of the machines to be backed up, with the server excluding portions of the directory tree? This is all on an internal network, so I can reasonably trust IP-based access controls to provide adequate security - though I really would prefer to stick with server-pull rather than client-push for the backups. Thanks. --Danny -- To unsubscribe or change options: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
