[Duplicity-talk] Excluding file patterns, regardless of the file location

[Madhusudan Singh]

Here is the problem:

I currently use rsync to backup my files to a local ssh server. The issue is that rsync does not encrypt, compress and backup, and I am considering moving to duplicity as my tool of choice. I am using this on Mac OSX and I already use duplicity (without the exclude spec) for my Amazon S3 backups. They work, so duplicity is functional on my platform. Hence, what follows is not a result of any OS-application snarls.

I tried to whip up a script to do this.

I am getting stuck at a specific requirement that I have (this uses --exclude-globbing-filelist option). I want to exclude ALL ps, bmp, tiff, avi, etc. files no matter where they are located.

So, I created an exclude file:

- *.avi

- *.ps

- .*.bmp

- *.mbox

...

(you get the idea)

and ran duplicity, passing the name of the exclude file to --exclude-globbing-filelist.

Duplicity chokes on this:

Fatal Error: The file specification

    *.avi

cannot match any files in the base directory

    /Users/smuser

Useful file specifications begin with the base directory or some

pattern (such as '**') which matches the base directory.

What can I do to fix this ? If it does not find an excluded file, go on to the next folder in the include filelist. Don't just choke on the absence of a file !