Archiving via rsync via shell script
 

I am attempting to contrive a shell script which will allow me to to use rsync and backup only about 6 directories to a DVD or pair of CDs.
1) am I correct in thinking that rsync is designed primarily to collect all directories then exclude until one has the directories of interest or is there a more direct approach?
2) when archiving to a DVD/CD can one put rsync in a for loop and specify the directory to collect files from one at a time and still be writing to the same device (I hope to devise a means of pausing and inserting an n-th CD unless that is known to be difficult)?
This is for Slackware 13.37 desktop.

I think rsync cannot split data and wait for the next CD, but tar can handle devices.

Never tired to do anything like that with rsync, but have done something similar using scp.

I did the whole copy first to a single directory on my receiving system, then my script would go through and make a sub-directory, and only move 640MB of data from the parent into it; If the next file to be moved would put it over 640MB, then a new subdir would be made, and the file put there. I was left with one directory, which had sub-directories in it, labeled disc1, disc2, etc. Each the size of a CDROM, ready to burn. That may be easier than trying to figure out how much data is rsync is handling on the fly. Just a suggestion.

rsync is very complex and has a typical manpage very difficult to understand. I spent some time reading the manpage and examples from the Web to exclude directories but there is also an "include" feature.

I use rsync from within my bash_aliases file with an rsync-filter file: