On Thu, 18 Jun 2020 at 00:12, Leland Best <lcbpub...@gmail.com> wrote: > As a > concrete example, on a recent Linux box '/sys/bus/pci/devices' contains > symbolic links named like '000:00:00.0'. So, when I do a "full system > backup" I may well have filenames with colons.
Just checking that you know even for a full system backup it doesn't make sense to backup /proc, /sys and other virtual file systems? Virtual file systems present data about and control of hardware, kernel and processes. They are dynamically created on every boot, not data stored on disk which can get lost. Display mounted virtual file systems: grep -v '^/dev/' /proc/mounts Suggest excluding like this: --exclude '/proc/**' --exclude '/sys/**' ... This way just the empty directory gets backed up, so on a bare metal restore the directory is recreated ready to be used as the mount point.