I'm trying to figure out how to exclude certain folders but I'm finding little to no information online on how exclude files worked.

I'm trying this to no avail:

Also tried with just one *. I want to skip any folder that is called /saves/.

Also when I enter a full path, what is the context of the path?

Like if I do rsync -vru /data/ /source

What do I put if I want to exclude /data/folder/ do I put just /folder/ or do I put /data/folder?

I spent hours searching and it seems this is an undocumented feature of rsync.

Also, how do I force it to delete folders if it gets deleted in the source? I just get "cannot delete non empty directory" errors. Tried --force no luck.

I use an exclude file instead of specifying them on the command line.

Contents of rsync_exclude.txt:

That's what I'm doing, just not sure the syntax.

So is it just a list of full paths with return, or is it relative paths to the backup source?

That's the exact syntax from my backup script, so it's full paths (including the trailing slash). You can add the "-n" option (rsync -n -av --delete) to test your command, just in case.

You are kidding right?

Here is the first link from Google "man rsync" which explains excludes in great detail.

http://www.manpagez.com/man/1/rsync/