I backup my webserver using rsync, there's a few files I don't want to backup - but despite what *I* want, rsync is still backing them up.

here's my cron command (as root, this is located in /root, and called as /root/file.sh from cron):
rsync -e ssh -azv /home/userdir NN.NNN.NNN.NNN:/backup2/webserver --exclude-from exclude-list.txt --delete-excluded

Then in the file 'exclude-list.txt I have the following:
../home/userdir/websites/dir1
../home/userdir/websites/dir2
../home/userdir/websites/logs
../home/userdir/websites/dir3
../home/userdir/websites/dir4


Yet those directories are still backed up every night.

I feel like I may have a problem with my path, but changing to /home/...... doesn't change it - it still backs up the files.

Try using an absolute path to the exclude file as well

Thanks! That was almost it, but not quite. I tried hardcoding the exclude file, no difference.

But when I ran the test, I noticed that the files it was backing up were listed as:
userdir/dir/file

instead of
/home/userdir/dir/file

And figured, perhaps the exclude files are relative to the files being rsynced (instead of relative to the current working dir). And sure enough, that worked.

In other words:
the original command was
rsynce /home/userdir

and to exclude /home/userdir/dir/, instead of using '/home/userdir/dir', I just used 'dir'. and that worked. Final exclude file looks like
websites/dir1
websites/dir2
etc.
And it worked!

Great, I've actually been stewing on this for years.

Glad you worked it out, I usually use Gnote so I don't forget all the little stumbling blocks I trip over

So did you use a file.txt with your excludes in it?

I normally do like this:

rsync -e "ssh -p 2222" -anP --exclude="_*" --exclude="*.xml" --exclude="*." --exclude=" --delete /opt/prod/dedmail/ sysadm01@ded02:/opt/prod/dedmail/


I use port 2222 going from server to server firewall rules block port 22.

However, I would like to know you do the text file with the excludes, I have another email server to migrate over and my rsync command is quite lengthy with all of my excludes and makes it quite cumbersome and easy to make a mistake.

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.