ok, if you are like me, i do backups all the time, and the best way to backup my files is to create tarballs. i have a linux server and i use it to host my wallpaper websites. as an admin, i have to backup my files frequently. today i came accross a problem. i wanted to create a backup file but i didnt want to include this huge file so i wanted to exclude it from my backups. but then i noticed that i had another directory i didnt want to be included in my backups. so now i have multiple (two or more) directories that i wanted to avoid including in my tar file. excluding these files would make my backups smaller and thus saving me space.

so the questions is, how do you tar a backup without including these two directories?

well the answer is easy, when you are done reading this short tutorial, you will learn how you can exclude a file or a directory in your tars.

ok, here is my example,

1. - i want to keep the same permission on each file and directory (-pczf)
2. - the name of my backup tar file is called mywebsites.tar.gz
3. - i wanted to backup my entire /var/www directory
4. - the two directories i did not want to put in my tar backup are:
    - /var/www/mydomain/images/
    - /var/www/otherdomain/pictures/

now that i have all these elements, i can construck the shell command im going to use in my linux server. so here is the command



so basically if you want to exclude a file that you dont want to be included in your tar, just use the --exclude option. easy huh

thats it

hope this helps

UPDATE, you can try this small test tutorial to see how it works: just send these command when you are logged into your shell terminal:


lets make a test directory and two other directories, one good and the other bad.

now lets create the archive of the test directories and its subdirectories, but exclude the bad/ directory

we remove the old test directory

now we extract the test directory


you will see a the verbose:

test/
test/good/

shows that test/bad/ was not created in the tarball