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Excluding Files

You can exclude folders and files by specifying exclude patterns, currently the exclude options are:

  • --git-ignore Respect .gitignore files and exclude paths/files not handled by git.
  • --glob include/exclude files and dirs based on given glob patterns
  • --iglob Same as --glob but ignores the case of paths
  • --glob-file Specified one or more times to exclude items listed in a given file
  • --iglob-file Same as --glob-file but ignores cases like in --iglob
  • --exclude-if-present foo Specified one or more times to exclude a folder’s content if it contains a file called foo. For example, to exclude cache dirs, specify --exclude-if-present CACHEDIR.TAG.
  • --exclude-larger-than size Specified once to excludes files larger than the given size

Please see rustic help backup for more specific information about each exclude option.

Let’s say we have a file called glob.txt with the following content:

# exclude go-files
!*.go
# exclude foo/x/y/z/bar foo/x/bar foo/bar
!foo/**/bar

It can be used like this:

rustic backup ~/work --glob="!*.c" --glob-file=glob.txt

This instructs rustic to exclude files matching the following criteria:

  • All files matching *.c (parameter --glob)
  • All files matching *.go (second line in glob.txt)
  • All files and sub-directories named bar which reside somewhere below a directory called foo (fourth line in glob.txt)

By specifying the option --one-file-system you can instruct rustic to only backup files from the file systems the initially specified files or directories reside on. In other words, it will prevent rustic from crossing filesystem boundaries and subvolumes when performing a backup.

For example, if you backup / with this option and you have external media mounted under /media/usb then rustic will not back up /media/usb at all because this is a different filesystem than /. Virtual filesystems such as /proc are also considered different and thereby excluded when using --one-file-system:

rustic -r /srv/rustic-repo backup --one-file-system /

Please note that this does not prevent you from specifying multiple filesystems on the command line, e.g:

rustic backup --one-file-system / /media/usb

will back up both the / and /media/usb filesystems, but will not include other filesystems like /sys and /proc.

Note: --one-file-system is currently unsupported on Windows, and will cause the backup to immediately fail with an error.

Files larger than a given size can be excluded using the --exclude-larger-than option:

rustic backup ~/work --exclude-larger-than 1M

This excludes files in ~/work which are larger than 1 MiB from the backup.

The default unit for the size value is bytes, so e.g. --exclude-larger-than 2048 would exclude files larger than 2048 bytes (2 KiB). To specify other units, suffix the size value with one of k/K for KiB (1024 bytes), m/M for MiB (1024^2 bytes), g/G for GiB (1024^3 bytes) and t/T for TiB (1024^4 bytes), e.g. 1k, 10K, 20m, 20M, 30g, 30G, 2t or 2T).