I'm just starting with tarsnap, and have it built, installed, and
running on my iMac running Mojave, and I've been doing some dry runs to
narrow down what I back up. Mostly things are working as I expect, but
I've got one case that I haven't figured out a way to do. That's where I
want to exclude a directory and its contents *except* for a smattering
of files under it. Here's a simplified example.
Say I have:
$ find a -print
a
a/f0
a/b
a/b/f2
a/b/f1
Then:
$ tarsnap --dry-run --no-default-config -c -v a
a a
a a/f0
a a/b
a a/b/f2
a a/b/f1
works as expected. Now, what I really want is to not archive anything in
a/b except a/b/f2. I can do that with -T:
$ cat T
a/f0
a/b/f2
$ tarsnap --dry-run --no-default-config -c -v -T T
a a/f0
a a/b/f2
but that means I lose all the directory metadata (if I include the
directories, it backups up the directories *and* the files I include
explicitly.) I could use nodump, but I'd have to set nodump on hundreds
of thousands of files, and I don't know what that would interfere with
(for example, one of my local backup methods is Time Machine and I want
it to back up some of the files I don't want tarsnap to back up). I've
tried include and exclude in .tarsnaprc, but nothing I've tried has
worked the way I want. So... any thoughts?
Thanks,
Brian
