Tar exclusion list doesn't work anymore after upgrading to Debian stretch
I wrote a backup script a long time ago, which uses this part of the tar manual:
You may give multiple `–exclude’ options.
--exclude-from=file
-X fileCauses tar to ignore files that match the patterns listed in file.
My tar command is the following:
includesFile=include.txt
excludesFile=exclude.txt
tar zcpf - . -T ${includesFile} -X ${excludesFile} | openssl des3 -salt | dd of=out.bak
This is include.txt:
/etc/
/var/
/usr/
/data/
/opt/
/root
This is exclude.txt
/data/webapp/webapp-data/*
/var/cache/*
/var/lib/dpkg/*
/usr/bin/*
/usr/share/locale/*
It used to work very well. Recently I noticed that the size of the archive increased significantly, and by switching to verbose tar made me see that it’s including the webapp-data directory which is huge. For some reason it’s not being excluded anymore.
The last thing I did is upgrading from Debian Jessie to Debian Stretch. The version change is minor, I wonder whether it’s the reason.
I tried changing /data/webapp/webapp-data/* to /data/webapp/webapp-data/**, but that didn’t help.
Why is the exclusion list not working anymore?
I had the same problem with tar exclusions after upgrading from Debian Jessie to Stretch and I fixed it by just changing the commandline parameters order
from:
tar cvzpf backup.tar.gz /DirToBackup1 /DirToBackup2 --exclude-from=/path/to/backup_exclude.txt
to:
tar cvzpf backup.tar.gz --exclude-from=/path/to/backup_exclude.txt /DirToBackup1 /DirToBackup2
my backup_exclude.txt looks like this
/var/log/*
/cache/*
/.cache/*
(refering to the end of the page of
https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_section/tar_49.html)
I (finally) have figured out the problem and was able to solve it. It’s a combination of multiple things, including that excludes are given as a wild-card (while before asking the question I didn’t do that… now that doesn’t work anymore). This is the command that works:
includesFile=include.txt
excludesFile=exclude.txt
tar -zcpf - --absolute-names -X ${excludesFile} -T ${includesFile} | openssl des3 -salt | dd of=out.bak
And definitely, excludes are given in this form:
/var/cache/*
/var/lib/dpkg/*
/usr/bin/*
/usr/share/locale/*
/proc/*
/sys/*
And includes:
/etc/
/var/
/usr/