Useful exclude patterns

Features and Ideas
1

I don’t know if this is appropriate, so if this is not acceptable for the forum remove the message etc.

I’ve had to exclude a fair number of files from my home directory as a GNU/Linux desktop user. As far as time investment in restic, I think that developing and debugging the exclude file is the biggest chunk.

I’m going to leave my exclude file here. I think that, if there’s interest, it could become a repository of exclude patterns for all sorts of users, perhaps should go on the wiki some day. If you have your own excludes to share I’ll be happy to learn from others.

# If there's any folder called .cache it's a cache
$HOME/**/Cache
$HOME/**/.cache
$HOME/**/__pycache__

# my development folders have too many copies of this
$HOME/projects/*/venv
$HOME/projects/*/env

# WebDAV mounts
$HOME/.davfs2/cache

# Trash
$HOME/.local/share/Trash

# Cache of IMAP messages
$HOME/.thunderbird/*/ImapMail

# I never keep important stuff there
$HOME/Downloads

# should be empty, but - eh
$HOME/mnt

# where I restore stuff
$HOME/restore

# firefox profiles, standard and snap install
$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/*/storage
$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/*/minidumps
$HOME/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox/*/storage
$HOME/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox/*/minidumps

# Chromium
$HOME/.config/chromium/Default/Local Storage
$HOME/.config/chromium/Default/Session Storage
SHOME/.config/chromium/Default/Application Cache
$HOME/snap/chromium/*/.config/chromium/Default/Local Storage
$HOME/snap/chromium/*/.config/chromium/Default/Session Storage
SHOME/snap/chromium/*/.config/chromium/Default/Application Cache

# Electron apps seem to do this
$HOME/.config/*/Cache
$HOME/.config/*/GPUCache
$HOME/.config/*/ShaderCache
$HOME/snap/*/*/.config/*/Cache
$HOME/snap/*/*/.config/*/GPUCache
$HOME/snap/*/*/.config/*/ShaderCache

# Microsoft VS Code follows different standards
$HOME/.config/Code/CachedData
$HOME/.config/Code/CachedExtensions
$HOME/.config/Code/logs

# I only use Wine to run the odd executable, so I exclude it all
$HOME/.wine
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2

Sweet!

One thing that came to mind looking at this list. Don’t skip your trash folder, I once read a backup story of people counting on certain files to be in their trash can after they delete them, as silly as it may sound to almost anybody that reads this, there are conputer users that suit my name better than myself :wink:

3

I posted the one I’m trying with here:

1 Like