Question

I am creating an automatic backup system. I plan on running a Cron Job that will, once a week, automatically create a backup and email it to a secure email.(this way, even if the server explodes into a million pieces I will have a full recent backup of my files that any administrator can access)

I found this simple method: system('tar -cvzpf backup.tar.gz /path/to/folder');

It works nearly perfectly for what I need. Only problem is there is one directory that I do not want included in the backup. On this website, users upload their own avatars and the directory in which the images are held is inside the directory I want backed up. Because I’m sending this via email I have to keep the folder relatively small, and a couple thousand images add up. Is there any way I could tell the function to ignore this directory and just compress everything else?

Answer 1

From the tar man:

 tar --exclude='/path/to/folder/bad' 

So you would get:

system('tar -czpf --exclude='/path/to/folder/bad'  backup.tar.gz /path/to/folder');

You can leave the v (verbose) out, since you are not watching your code being executed.