On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 12:35:39PM +1000, Carl Turney wrote:
Prior to doing the complete system backups (as outlined in my last email), I enter Firefox and clear all history.
why? it's not going to make that much difference in time taken or space consumed. and you can always use --exclude to tell rsync not to backup certain files or directories.
But, during the backup (after booting into Recovery mode), rsync displays the copying of MANY files within this directory...
/home/user/.cache/mozilla/firefox/abcd1234.default/cache2/trash/3363925
Given the names of some of those directories, I wonder if it is safe to delete them (rm -r) just before the backup?
If so, at which level... trash? cache2?
anyway, there's no need to delete before backing up, just tell rsync not to backup that directory. you could probably exclude the entire ~/.cache directory from the rsync backup. e.g. by adding --exclude='/home/*/.cache/' to your rsync command line. (NOTE: depending on exactly what you are backing up, you may or may not need the leading / on /home in that pattern. rsync filter patterns are strange - different to both glob patterns and regexps - and, IME, take some trial and error to get right. use the --dry-run option for testing. see the rsync man page and search for FILTER PATTERNS. IIRC if you are backing up from / then you want the pattern to start with /home, if you are backup up from /home then the exclude pattern would be better written as '*/.cache/') or if you just want to exclude the mozilla cache, try something like: --exclude='**.mozilla**cache**' you can get rsync to delete the directories from the target if they were backed up on previous runs with '--delete-excluded --force' craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>