rsync will not read from include file

I am trying to use rsync to do backups. I have an include file called /etc/daily.rsync and it contains the following:

+ /home/demo - * 

Then I run the command below:

$ sudo rsync -acvv --delete --include-from=/etc/daily.rsync /mnt/offsite_backup/home/ sending incremental file list delta-transmission disabled for local transfer or --whole-file drwxrwxr-x 6 2021/02/22 14:09:13 . total: matches=0 hash_hits=0 false_alarms=0 data=0 sent 52 bytes received 131 bytes 366.00 bytes/sec total size is 0 speedup is 0.00 

When I go look in the directory I see nothing. What I think is that it is trying to rsync from the current directory which btw is empty. So this leaves me to believe that it is not getting the data form the include file.

This command runs as expected:

sudo rsync -acvv --delete /home/demo /mnt/offsite_backup/home/ 

The different posts made many suggestions, and I have tried them. I am just stuck. Any thoughts would be very welcome.

2 Answers

I think you're misunderstanding what a filter file (like the one you specified with --include-from) does. It does not specify where to sync files from; it specifies which files within the source directory to sync.

You need to specify both the source and destination as part of the command line. In the command:

sudo rsync -acvv --delete --include-from=/etc/daily.rsync /mnt/offsite_backup/home/ 

You only specified one directory, /mnt/offsite_backup/home/, so rsync has assumed it's the source, and there is no destination. According to the rsync man page:

As a special case, if a single source arg is specified without a destination, the files are listed in an output format similar to "ls -l".

So, basically, it's listing the contents of /mnt/offsite_backup/home/, and apparently that's empty.

The second command you gave specifies both the source and destination, which is why it works correctly. If you want to add a filter file to, be aware that the paths in the filter will be relative to the source. So if you used

sudo rsync -acvv --delete --include-from=/etc/daily.rsync /home/demo /mnt/offsite_backup/home/ 

...it's going to try to include the file/directory /home/demo/home/demo, which probably doesn't exist. Except it actually won't do that, because the - * line will exclude /home/demo/home, so if it did exist, it and its contents will be excluded. You need to include the parent directories of anything you want to include in the sync operation. Again, from the man page:

The concept path exclusion is particularly important when using a trailing '*' rule. For instance, this won't work:

+ /some/path/this-file-will-not-be-found
+ /file-is-included
- *

This fails because the parent directory "some" is excluded by the '*' rule, so rsync never visits any of the files in the "some" or "some/path" directories. One solution is to ask for all directories in the hierarchy to be included by using a single rule: "+ */" (put it somewhere before the "- *" rule), and perhaps use the --prune-empty-dirs option. Another solution is to add specific include rules for all the parent dirs that need to be visited. For instance, this set of rules works fine:

+ /some/
+ /some/path/
+ /some/path/this-file-is-found
+ /file-also-included
- *

ok, so after walking away from the problem I realized that, I never specified what actual directory I wanted to sync. The include can't work from thin air. so the command is:

sudo rsync -acv --delete /home/ --include-from=/etc/weekly.rsync /mnt/offline_backup/home/ 

The include file had to change as well.

+ demo/*** + truenorth/*** - * 

To have it decend into the directory structure, I needed the ***. I hope this can help someone else out.