Exclude a path from a backup

[yunohost-bot]

Original Redmine Issue: 837

Author Name: ljf

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It should be possible to specifically exclude a path from a backup.

It could be easy to do if #334 is done correctly.

[nicofrand]

This would be reallllly useful to avoid backuping useless files like logs and cached files.

For example I asked several apps to ignore their cached files in their backup (https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/rainloop_ynh/issues/51, https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/freshrss_ynh/issues/64).

My initial issue is that I use borg to backup my YunoHost on a paid server. The more I store the more I pay, and borg cannot deduplicate cached files since they always change.

Adding a way to exclude several paths from a backup would reveal mandatory to fix it on each app level I think.

[nicofrand]

What would you think of something like ynh_backup path_tobackup --exclude path_to_ignore,other_path ?

There already are several arguments to ynh_backup so the use of --exclude might make it more clear?

See https://github.com/YunoHost/yunohost/blob/stretch-unstable/data/helpers.d/filesystem#L13.

[zamentur]

May be we should create a helper ynh_backup_exclude to let application decide which dir need to be excluded.

We should check before it's possible with borg, tar and copy to exclude a path.

[M5oul]

For now, to bypass this limitation we could do:

yunohost app map

yunohost backup create --debug --apps <copy/pasta from upper results> --system