Just wanted to add my note of thanks for the info in this thread.
However, I’ve tried adding the following line at the top of the exclude.txt on my source NAS: {Edit: fixed… see at bottom}
/DataVolume/shares/Mike_Shared/Pictures (Mirror)/
This folder didn’t exist until now (it is to hold a mirror from my S: drive, which I don’t want to back up again to my second NAS). I put some stuff in the folder, and then ran an existing safepoint backup to update it.
BUT that new folder and the stuff in it appeared on the destination NAS, despite being in an excluded folder.
What am I doing wrong? Does this only work on completely new safepoint, or should it also work on an existing safepoint that is updated on a subsequent run? In other words, are these exclusions read at the time of performing a backup, or at the time of creating the backup job?
EDIT:
just realised that there are other paths to the actual shares, and hence the other two variants included in the examples on the first page. Strange that there are multiple paths. Anyhow, I just included the following single line to catch all such paths:
Mike_Shared/Pictures (Mirror)/
And this works with existing backups BTW.
P.S. is the safepoint backup actually just a mirror? Doesn’t seem like any there is any history or evidence of incremental updates in the destination, so I’m assuming so.
Your first attempt didn’t work because you made the same mistake as I did. The root of the rsync backup is /DataVolume/shares so the line you need to put in is:
/Mike_Shared/Pictures (Mirror)/
Remember that once a firmware update is applied you’ll have to reapply all the tweaks.
I ended up using the latter, and it seems to work. I thought the former would imply that Mike_Shared was at the root level of the drive, which it isn’t. I thought the issue was that there are multiple paths to the same share:
Before I made the modification to my MBL’s Safepoint backup I created a script to perform dry-runs and display verbose results to see exactly what rsync was going.
This one is correct . . .
/Mike_Shared/Pictures (Mirror)/
It’ll make sure that the following path is excluded from the sharepoint backup as rsync resolves this to . . .
/DataVolume/shares/Mike_Shared/Pictures (Mirror)/
I did quite a number of dry-runs to make sure I got it the tweak right.
