Hi all,
I probably can't see the wood for the trees at the moment and I'm sure I've missed something, but I am trying to backup my / (i.e. everything) using TAR to an external HDD within a script.

I can get TAR to copy, but I can't seem to get the syntax correct when I am telling it to exclude certain dirs.

If I don't exclude the dir that the external HDD is mounted at, it will end up backing up my backup drive too.

Where DWORKIN is the external HDD.

Any attempt to exclude a directory fails, as when I watch the files go by (verbose output) it starts backing up /media/DWORKIN too.

It also doesn't work as --exclude=media. I've read the man page and "tar --help" but all it says it that What it doesn't do is explain what the pattern of PATTERN is!

Also, googling didn't help in this instance.

Many thanks in advance,

What you have right now for your exclude phrase is:
I'm thinking that the file name pattern should be:
While it's true that a directory is sort of a file, the actual files that the PATTERN looks for is files within a directory. I think that by adding something to indicate files, all in this case, within a directory that are to be excluded, you should have better luck.

Strange - works for me using tar 1.15.1 (simple test example):

$ cd /tmp/testdir
$ ls
dir1 dir2 dir3
$ tar -zcvpf dir3/dirs.tar.gz --exclude=dir2 --exclude=dir3 .
./
./dir1/
./dir1/file0
./dir1/file1
./dir1/file2
./dir1/file3
./dir1/file4

Are you sure that your /media/DWORKIN is not symlinked from somewhere else under / ?

regards

Mark

Not to change the subject, but dar works great for that kind of thing. The settings seem very user-friendly and I've been using it successfully for a while now. Anyway, tar should work fine, but dar seems to be a better system for major system-wide backups like that.

I have been using ESR backup quite sucessfully for backup of 4 computers to a remote HDD. It is very easy to setup and my be what your looking for. Works for one or many computers!

www.shawnscott.net/esr/

Use rsync if you're simply mirroring a drive, and dar as your solution if you want to back up compressed image files (BTW, this backs up files individually within a volume, so one disk error means ONE problem file, not a stack of them). I do both regularly (rsync every couple of days, dar monthly), and once I got the setup debugged, I haven't had problems.

For details, go to my article:
http://www.linuxpipeline.com/shared/...leId=171200965

In fact, my backup methods as described will even automatically back up the /boot partition. Not an issue for most people, but if you have had occasion to make changes, you'll appreciate this. I say methods because it'll walk you through both rsync to a drive mirror and dar to a stack of DVD-Rs.

You need to write '--exclude=./media/*' '--exclude=./proc/*'
because tar backs up ".", so the pathes it sees are

./
./media
./media/some_file

and so on.

I would also recommend to exclude

/dev/pts/* (pseudo terminal devices),
/dev/shm/* (shared-memory based RAM disk)
/sys/* (sysfs, a bit like /proc).

Hth,
Torsten

You could also create a file somewhere on your machine called "backup.excludes", which contains "/proc", "/dev", or whatever you want to exclude, and then use the flag "--exclude-from /somedir/backup.excludes". I've been successful with that syntax, even though, like you, I've never had any luck using "--exclude".

I've resolved it now, it turns out I was missing the "/" to tell it to backup the root directory - I placed a / after the filename and before the excludes and it worked fine.

Many Thanks all - I will be looking into RSYNC now, but the backup was a matter of urgency and I didn't have time to look into another program in the timeframe, hence why I used TAR.