I had a lot of trouble when trying to exclude certain files and directories for
a backup using smb for the transfer method. I was unable to find solutions in
this mailing list or the samba mailing list and so I did a bunch of testing
with smbclient. I found that for smbclient to properly match it was necessary
to use '\' for directory separators (not '/') and in addition the last
separator must be a double backslash ('\\') and in addition to that each
backslash must be escaped with, of course, a backslash. (quadruple backslash in
places)
An example:
$Conf{BackupFilesExclude} = {
'*' => [
'\\\\Application Data',
'\\Documents\\\\My Music',
'\\Downloads\\big_files\\\\debian_install_dvd.iso
'\\\\ntuser.dat.LOG1',
'*.lock',
'*\\Thumbs.db',
'*\\.*'
]
};
In the above example, the "Application Data" directory is excluded. To exclude
"\Documents\My Music", the quadruple backslash is placed before "My Music" and
not "Documents". Next the file "debian_install_dvd.iso" in the directory
"Downloads\big_files" is excluded. Note again that the last directory
separator has a quadruple backslash. The next line excludes the file
"ntuser.dat.LOG1" in the root directory. The next line excludes any ".lock"
file. Note that the asterisk at the beginning not only matches the first part
of the filename but also the directory tree. When matching files it is
necessary to match the directories as well, which leads to the next line which
excludes the "Thumbs.db" file found in any directory. The last line excludes
any file or directory which begins with '.'.
Note that if you use the BackupPC GUI, the backslashes do not need to be
escaped. You can use single and double backslashes instead of double and
quadruple.
This is how it worked for me using BackupPC 3.1.0 with samba 3.2.5 on Debian
Lenny backing up a Windows Vista computer. Since I can't imagine that this is
how it's supposed to work you may or may not get the same results with
different versions of samba or Windows or whatever. But hopefully others are
able to make use of my own trials and heartache.
--
Chris Purves
"I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."
- Sir Isaac Newton
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