rsync --exclude driving me crazy

[fourhead]

I'm using rsnapshot to backup a server to a second harddisk. The second harddisk is mounted under /backup. I want to backup all of /, except for /backup (would be funny to do that I guess) and /tmp. So I start rsync (which itself works fine) with --exclude=backup/ --exclude=tmp/. But rsync still wants to backup /tmp and /backup! I also tried it with --exclude=/backup or --exclude=/backup/ etc. but it didn't help, whatever I try, rsync always also wants to read the contents of /backup and /tmp. What am I doing wrong here? The rsnapshot config file is OK, and I can see during the verbose output that the --exclude params are given to rsync. Any ideas?

Tom

[apfritts]

have you tried to do individual directories?

[fourhead]

You mean backup /etc to /backup/etc, /usr to /backup/usr and so forth? Well it's an idea, a little more complicated of course but I'll try it

[apfritts]

yea....but you can always write a quick script to do it

that is how i had to do if when i made a backup of my system...except i just used cp instead of rsnapshot....hhmm

[fourhead]

Ok I just edited rsnapshot.conf accordingly and see what happens ... still running ... ... ... takes a long time ... I need a faster HD ... ... making myself a coffee ... drinking the coffee ... drinking the second coffee ... damn .. and it WORKS! Thank you!. Well I'm still interested why it didn't work in the first way, but I think I know why. Rsnapshot expects to make a backup under the backup-root (/backup in my case), then hostname, then daily.0. So the path looks like /backup/hostname/daily.0 But I didn't want the hostname, so I told rsnapshot to not backup to hostname/ but to ./ and this may have confused rsync. Now, with your method, I still have --exclude=portage/ and this works.

Thanks a lot!

Tom