A while ago, I posted an article on using cron to make backups of folders on Linux web hosting. One issue I’ve become aware of since then is that there are some folders I want to exclude from the backup process. I did some exploring and found the --exclude switch can be used to exclude a single folder; to exclude multiple folders, you can use the switch multiple times.
The example below, excludes the backup folder and anything which has a name starting with a .:
/*
Created by Ian Grieve of azurecurve | Ramblings of an IT Professional (http://www.azurecurve.co.uk)
This code is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Int).
*/
/bin/tar -czvf /home/{username]/backups/backup_{foldername}_$(date +\%Y\%m\%d\%H\%M\%S).tar.gz --exclude=backups --exclude=".*" /home/{username}/{foldername}
The highlighted section shows the two exclude switches used to exclude the folders and files we don’t want to backup.