You can also list the patterns you wish to exclude in a file, and use that like this:
Code:
echo "/home/mcarrick/video" >> ~/my_excludes
echo "/home/mcarrick/downloads" >> ~/my_excludes
tar czf /path/to/backup_file.tar.gz --exclude-from=~/my_excludes /home/mcarrick/
Depending on how you are working, this may or may not be more easily maintainable than using multiple --exclude=... options on the command line. My personal opinion is that it is clearer if you have a lot of excludes to do, and is especially useful if you do frequent tar operations and every so often need to change the list.
{edit: changed ~/my_excludes filename mismatch between echo and tar commands}
