Backup¶

Currently, all users’ $HOME directories are being backed up daily. You can exclude files / directories by adding them to the file $HOME/.borg/excludelist. We ask you to only back up important data, as backup space is limited (currently, we don’t enforce any quotas, though).

Excluding files / directories from the daily backup¶

[This section is taken from the Borg documentation]

Exclusion patterns support four separate styles, fnmatch, shell, regular expressions and path prefixes. By default, fnmatch is used. If followed by a colon (:) the first two characters of a pattern are used as a style selector. Explicit style selection is necessary when a non-default style is desired or when the desired pattern starts with two alphanumeric characters followed by a colon (i.e. aa:something/*).

Fnmatch (selector fm:)

Fnmatch is the default style. These patterns use a variant of shell pattern syntax, with * matching any number of characters, ? matching any single character, [...] matching any single character specified, including ranges, and [!...] matching any character not specified. For the purpose of these patterns, the path separator (\ for Windows and / on other systems) is not treated specially. Wrap meta-characters in brackets for a literal match (i.e. [?] to match the literal character ?). For a path to match a pattern, it must completely match from start to end, or must match from the start to just before a path separator. Except for the root path, paths will never end in the path separator when matching is attempted. Thus, if a given pattern ends in a path separator, a * is appended before matching is attempted.
Shell-style patterns (selector sh:)

Like fnmatch patterns these are similar to shell patterns. The difference is that the pattern may include **/ for matching zero or more directory levels, * for matching zero or more arbitrary characters with the exception of any path separator.
Regular expressions (selector re:)

Regular expressions similar to those found in Perl are supported. Unlike shell patterns regular expressions are not required to match the complete path and any substring match is sufficient. It is strongly recommended to anchor patterns to the start (^), to the end ($) or both. Path separators (\ for Windows and / on other systems) in paths are always normalized to a forward slash (/) before applying a pattern. The regular expression syntax is described in the Python documentation for the re module.
Prefix path (selector pp:)

This pattern style is useful to match whole sub-directories. The pattern pp:/data/bar matches /data/bar and everything therein.

Example¶

For example, if you want to backup your whole $HOME directory except for $HOME/tmp, your $HOME/.borg/excludelist should look like this:

/home/YOURUSERNAME/tmp