Hi there, Just signed up and put $50 in my account (sorry, did $35 then $15 because I forgot to account for upload *and* storage costs), but I'm stuck. Yesterday I did eventually calculate my expected usage using the --dry-run parameter, but only by running a series of discrete commands (e.g., tarsnap --dry-run --print-stats --humanize-numbers -c /media/USER/PATH --exclude /media/USER/PATH/.Trash-1000 /media/USER/PATH/lost +found /media/USER/PATH/OTHER-EXCLUDED-DIRECTORY) on the paths I wanted to back up. I could not figure out a way to run one command and have tarsnap read /etc/tarsnap.conf to get my list of included and excluded paths.
So here I am today and now wanting to run my first real back-up and I'm stuck on the same problem. The information in step 1A at http://www.tarsnap.com/simple-usage.html still seems to require me to put my list of included and excluded paths on the command line. Why is this? Why doesn't tarsnap just get the list from tarsnap.conf? I don't mind if that's just the way it's done, but then I'm confused about why there are options in tarsnap.conf to include and exclude paths. To make it clear how my system is set up, my tarsnap.conf contains the following lines: exclude /media/USER/PATH/.Trash-1000 exclude /media/USER/PATH/lost+found exclude /media/USER/PATH/_hold include /media/USER/PATH include /home/USER include /etc include /opt (/media/USER/PATH is where my spinning rust is mounted. In effect it's my "home" directory, where 99.9% of my data is stored. I don't store most stuff on the SSD [ / ] where the OS is installed and where my real "home" directory is located.) So is this really the full command I need to put in my tarsnap-backup.sh script?: /usr/local/bin/tarsnap -c \ -f "$(uname -n)-$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S)" \ /media/USER/PATH \ --exclude /media/USER/PATH/.Trash-1000 \ /media/USER/PATH/lost+found \ /media/USER/PATH/_hold \ --include /home/USER /etc /opt Thanks. Craig
