Duplicity include/exclude directories & symlinks

Question

I'm trying to configure Duplicity to perform a system-wide settings backup. Among other things, I'd like to backup settings in /etc/portage/, the file /usr/src/linux/.config and the KDE autostart scripts located in /home/myuser/.kde4/Autostart/. This is what my current backup-include-list.txt looks like:

/etc/timezone

/usr/src/linux/.config

- /etc/portage/bin/
- /etc/portage/make.conf.catalyst
- /etc/portage/make.profile
- /etc/portage/postsync.d/
- /etc/portage/repo.postsync.d/
/etc/portage

/home/myuser/.bashrc
/home/myuser/.kde4/Autostart/

The command I use to run Duplicity:

duplicity -v8 --asynchronous-upload --full-if-older-than 30D --include-filelist backup-include-list.txt --exclude '**' / $REMOTE_URL

/etc/timezone and .bashrc are backed up successfully. However, nothing in either of /etc/portage/ or /home/myuser/.kde4/Autostart/ is copied. Furthermore, Duplicity doesn't handle the symlink /usr/src/linux/ and after restoring I end up with

$ ls -l testrestore/usr/src
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20  4 June  16:20 linux -> linux-3.18.12-gentoo

My version is duplicity 0.6.25.

This question is of no help, since I have pretty much the same situation and the proposed solution doesn't work for me. How do I fix the included/excluded directories and the symlink problem?

Answer 1

use --include-globbing-filelist instead. before 0.7.03 ordinary file list parameters were globbing agnostic.

wrt. the symlink issue. this might be a corner case as the symlink resolves to a destination in an excluded folder. try including

 + /usr/src/linux*/.config

generally use either globbing syntax or not, as outlined in the answer you linked above.

good luck ..ede/duply.net