I'm trying to set a nightly backup using cron. When I run the command via terminal I get no issues, but with cron the code runs disregarding the parameters (e.g. the excluded directories). This gives me tiers of duplicates until the external drive is full. What is wrong with my code? Why is it running normally via terminal? I've been struggling over this for hours. I'm on Linux Mint 17.1.

Thank you!

BASH brace expansion vs whatever shell cron uses?
As in just write those --exclude= items out instead?

Thanks for your help. Still not having any luck. I was a bit confused by your response so I went searching around StackExchange and found some advice to switch the crontab shell using:

I didn't have any luck with that, and wasn't able to get my cron file to run at all. Would you mine posting an example of what you meant? I think cron runs with shell rather than bash.

I only meant you should write them excludes out one by one like "--exclude=/dev/ --exclude=/sys/" and so forth.
- cron will mail errors to the owner of that crontab so do check that mail box. (Obviously that won't work if the problem resides elsewhere.)
- sudo might not work (requires terminal access for pass phrase) unless you have explicit NOPASSWD entries for this user and those commands.
- When stuff doesn't work rsync-wise do note you can (should?) make the process more verbose. So until stuff gets fixed you could add "-n -v --logfile=/tmp/somefile --itemize-changes --stats".