On 26.09.21 00:24, Default User wrote:
Hello! I want to try using borgbackup to do backups of my (only) user directory: /home/debian-user I just want to do so using Vorta, a GUI for borgbackup. But I just need a good, general list of directory and file type exclusions that I can just cut and paste into the Exclude Patterns window in Vorta. Something like the default list of exclusions that appears by default in the Backintime backup program. Note 1: borgbackup uses a matching pattern called "Fnmatch" with which I am not familiar, and don't want to learn by trial and error, losing data in the process. Which is why I am looking for a "drop-in" basic exclude list. Note 2: I am not intending to use borgbackup to back up the whole system; just /home/debian-user and its subdirectories. I am using timeshift to back up the rest of the system. Timeshift uses a huge amount of disk space, but it . . . works. Note 3: I am aware that some use backintime to back up user data, and I have tried it myself. But it just seems to have some "problems". For example, the built-in "diff" utility does not seem to do anything. It seems old and gives the impression of not being heavily developed. The documentation is "adequate" but mediocre. And what really grinds my gears about backintime, a problem apparently known as far back as 2014: "Warning: A recent security audit revealed several possible attack vectors for EncFs.From https://defuse.ca/audits/encfs.htm:EncFS is probably safe as long as the adversary only gets one copy of the ciphertext and nothing more. EncFS is not safe if the adversary has the opportunity to see two or more snapshots of the ciphertext at different times. EncFS attempts to protect files from malicious modification, but there are serious problems with this feature. This might be a problem with Back In Time snapshots." Gee . . . think so?
The following is an example for what could be in an exclude file for the borg command being used at the CLI with the option:
--exclude-from myExcludeFile , # The following items will be excluded from the borg backup # use absolute paths like in: "borg create repo::archive /home/someUserName" # do NOT use relative paths like in "borg create repo::archive ." ## a slash as the last character excludes all contents but not the dir name itself
# like this the softlinks are preserved /home/someUserName/.cache/ /home/someUserName/Downloads/ /home/someUserName/TEMP/ /home/someUserName/.julia/artifacts/ /home/someUserName/.julia/compiled/ /home/someUserName/.julia/conda/ /home/someUserName/.julia/packages/ /home/someUserName/.julia/registries/ /home/someUserName/.opt/You will see that I personally decided to not include in my Backup some quit common folders:
.cache Downloads TEMPYou will also see, that I did not exclude a particular single file, only complete directories. You could do so, you could include in teh list particular files, if of interest to you.
I then have some folders to which I install software relevant only to this user, and as this user could anytime reinstall this software, the content of these folders do not contain user data or configuration data of importance, I decided to not fill my backups with the huge and often changing content of these folders:
.opt .julia/selectionOfReinstallableJuliaFoldersNote that I did not include the complete tree ".julia", because in other sub-directories of Julia there is important user data and configuration data which I do want to become backuped!
I wouldn't know about a general recommendation about folders which by default are recommended for exclusion. You will have to go for the effort and personally decide for your very own situation. If you have an exclusion list which you are happy with from other software, you mentioned backintime, maybe you can learn from my above example about the borg syntax and reuse the exclusions which backintime has configured for you? Note the in my above example there are comment lines included, everything behind the sign "#" is a comment and the comment ends at the end of line. These line can be part of the exclude file and do not harm, they will simply be ignored when borg searches for the entries of to be excluded files or directories. These comments point out some frecuentley parts of particular interest when populating a borg exclusion file. However, nothing beets reading the original documentation.
Good Luck! Marco