Duplicity does already a great job of making efficient backups, but I want still to minimize the amount of files being back-upped.
What files or directories can be excluded in a home directory? Please name these explicitly, wildcards allowed, paths are relative to the home directory.
Most of these files and directories are recreated if missing. They are mostly intended for lowering the startup time of an application (Firefox extensions cache), indicating locks (
.gksu.lock), or containing session-specific information (e.g. ID of dbus session). Recent documents changes frequently and is generally not that sensible to backup.These directories may be excluded:
Flash-specific:
Files:
KDE specific:
Firefox-specific (see also Profile folder):
Opera-specific (related question on Superuser.com: Is documentation available on files and directories in the Opera profile folder?):
Komodo Edit:
GnuPG:
Google Chrome:
Other apps:
Good question. I like these -- where we can gather community input/lists and cherry pick relevant stuff. Here's my
.excludefile. I feed this file to rsync as an--exclude-file=parameter in multiple scripts (which you can also do with duplicity). Note that the question implies "what do you want/need to save". For example, I backup my complete.mozillaDIR as it contains multiple profiles and tweaks and it's easier to dump it back on disk as a whole. Also implied in my config: I do a lot of "build from the ground up installs" for testing. So I have a clonezilla image of a known-good-clean-base install, and I add in my personal (/home) data stored on USB after it's on disk; sometimes selectively, sometimes as a whole.I created an ignorelist at https://github.com/rubo77/rsync-homedir-excludes
You can use it with Duplicity or rsync like:
this is regularely updated, at the moment we have this so far:
I've recently been looking at doing this sort of thing, and I've noticed that many of the files in my home directory that I don't want to back up seem to not have group permissions set. If the same holds on other systems, then a likely list of suspects might be obtained with:
(Although check the output, because although mine seemed mostly good, my e-mail inbox also appeared on the list, and I don't know how well it will work for others.)
This is particularly appealing to me, because my home directory is encrypted (including filenames), so a manual exclusions list would be a PITA, and instead I should be able to use group permissions to auto-generate an exclusion list.
(I know the thread is old, but I thought this might be useful to someone.)