How to exclude symbolic link in rsync/rsnapshot

Question

I am using rsnapshot to manage my backups. The file /home/foo/bar is a symbolic link to a folder, and I want to exclude it. The --exclude option does not work, because if the pattern ends with a / then it will only match a directory, not a symlink.

How could I do this?

The rsync man page says:

if the pattern ends with a / then it will only match a directory, not a regular file, symlink, or device.

So what I'm asking is: how can I exclude from rsnapshot a symbolic link to a folder?

If the link is /home/foo/bar, which of the following config lines is the right one?

exclude /home/foo/bar/

exclude /home/foo/bar

exclude /home/foo/bar**

exclude /home/foo/bar***

This is the config file that I'm using now:

config_version  1.2
snapshot_root   /media/satellite/rsnapshot/

cmd_cp      /bin/cp
cmd_rm      /bin/rm
cmd_rsync   /usr/bin/rsync
cmd_logger  /usr/bin/logger

retain      hourly  6
retain      daily   7
retain      weekly  4

verbose     2
loglevel    3

lockfile    /var/run/rsnapshot.pid

exclude /home/roberto/media/
exclude /home/roberto/media
exclude /home/roberto/media**
exclude /home/roberto/media***

backup  /home/      localhost/
backup  /etc/       localhost/
backup  /usr/local/ localhost/
backup  /var/www/   localhost/

Where /home/roberto/media is a symlink to /media, which is a directory

Answer 1

Unless you set rsync_short_args or rsync_long_args in the configuration file for rsnapshot, you'll use rsync -a to perform the copy.

The default action for rsync -a is to copy a symlink as a symlink, and to ignore the target of the symlink. (Obviously, if the target of the symlink is within your source file tree it will get copied, but that's because of its position not because it's the target of an included symlink.)

If you want to exclude the symlink itself, you just need to reference it in an exclude line:

exclude /foo/bar

I've not included the leading /home because that's the root of your source tree and filters are always based on the root of the source.