andrewchambers
Support CACHEDIR.TAG
My current plan is to let the user pass in an include/exclude list that they can generate however they want.
An option to dynamically inject an exclude check might be a more general approach to the problem. There is more than one approach other than cachedir to deal with this problem:
- Borg and others have support for "marker files" one can put in directories to ignore them
- Most of them simply check if a file exists in a directory, in contrast to cachedir. The general concept stays the same
- On file systems that support it, extended file attributes ("tags") can be used
Personally, I like to exclude all files that are ignored by version control. In any case, having a script generate an exclude list before the backup is tedious and error-prone. On HDDs this also greatly reduces performance. Furthermore, making a snapshot before the backup is strongly recommended, because the file system smear will be even larger than usual.
I have marked this issue as maybe - I would like #262 first as it covers a some of the same functionality and can be used on CACHEDIR.TAG files (though does not check the tag header, which may or may not be an issue).