There are two folders in my server that I backup frequently but one of these folders contains 2 directories that contain a lot of files and is very big. It takes 20 hours to make backups due to these 2 folders that I don't even need to backup as changes never take places in them and these directories and there files are already saved locally on my hard drive as well.

So I already know this will back up the two folders:

tar -cvvf myftp.tar url.com/ url2.com/

I know the above backs up:

"url1.com/" folder and "url2.com/" folder

I want the code to backup the following:

Everything in url1.com EXCEPT: "url1.com/files" and “url1.com/photos” and then Everything in "url2.com/"

Hopefully this makes sense, and any help on this would be a life saver and I would really appreciate it, I would save so much electricity with a code for this, right now backups take about 20 hours . Thanks.

I did some reading up

It takes about 20 hours to try and see if it works and if doesn't I'll have to come back in 20 hours, so could you tell me if you think this would work?

tar -cvvf myftp.tar url1.com/ --exclude=url1.com/files --exclude=url1.com/photos url2.com/

Do you think the code above will do this:

Everything in url1.com EXCEPT: "url1.com/files" and “url1.com/photos” and then Everything in "url2.com/"

You need rsync mate.

Using rsync allows your backups to only add modified files so your 20 cycle will drop to a lot lower.

do a man rsync or google it.

rsync allows local backups (can even pipe via gzip) or you can mirror your desired directories on remote machines using rsync.

Let me know if you have any issues

ibbo

thanks but,im so confused, theres no installer on rysnc, i moved it my server and there just a bunch of files, what do i do , i read the install file this is all it said

To build and install rsync:

$ ./configure
$ make
# make install

You may set the installation directory and other parameters by options
to ./configure. To see them, use:

$ ./configure --help

Configure tries to figure out if the local system uses group "nobody" or
"nogroup" by looking in the /etc/group file. (This is only used for the
default group of an rsync daemon, which attempts to run with "nobody"
user and group permissions.) You can change the default user and group
for the daemon by editing the NOBODY_USER and NOBODY_GROUP defines in
config.h, or just override them in your /etc/rsyncd.conf file.

As of 2.4.7, rsync uses Eric Troan's popt option-parsing library. A
cut-down copy of release 1.6.4 is included in the rsync distribution,
and will be used if there is no popt library on your build host, or if
the --with-included-popt option is passed to ./configure.

If you configure using --enable-maintainer-mode, then rsync will try
to pop up an xterm on DISPLAY=:0 if it crashes. You might find this
useful, but it should be turned off for production builds.

RPM NOTES
---------

Under packaging you will find .spec files for several distributions.
The .spec file in packaging/lsb can be used for Linux systems that
adhere to the Linux Standards Base (e.g., RedHat and others).

HP-UX NOTES
-----------

The HP-UX 10.10 "bundled" C compiler seems not to be able to cope with
ANSI C. You may see this error message in config.log if ./configure
fails:

(Bundled) cc: "configure", line 2162: error 1705: Function prototypes are an ANSI feature.

Install gcc or HP's "ANSI/C Compiler".

MAC OSX NOTES
-------------

Some versions of Mac OS X (Darwin) seem to have an IPv6 stack, but do
not completely implement the "New Sockets" API.

<http://www.ipv6.org/impl/mac.html> says that Apple started to support
IPv6 in 10.2 (Jaguar). If your build fails, try again after running
configure with --disable-ipv6.

IBM AIX NOTES
-------------

IBM AIX has a largefile problem with mkstemp. See IBM PR-51921.
The workaround is to append the below to config.h
#ifdef _LARGE_FILES
#undef HAVE_SECURE_MKSTEMP
#endif

is it just me or does this sound confusing to anyone else to, if its just me could some explain what I should do with the files, I can't make a folder called './configure' if thats even what it's asking but i moved them onto my server in a foler called configure on the base directory, now what?

Are you running unix or linux? if so what distro are you on?

Does your ISP let you have shell access?

Rsync comes by default with most distro's and you should be able to run rsync straight from the shell. Do you have linux on your local machine?

You should not have to build rsync from scratch (which wont build if your a windows user).

You can try this though if you are Installing rsync on a windows machine.

Let me know whats what and if your running linux try typing rsync and hit return.

Ibbo