need rsync expert

[EndianX]

I need some help with rsync. Let me explain what it is I'm trying to do. Let's say the root of my system looks like this...

/backups/
/dir1/
/dir2/
/dir2/backups/
/dir3/
...
/dir10/

Now what I want to do is sync dir1 through dir10...basically grab the whole root and store it in /backups. And of course I want to exclude the /backups directory because that will have the backed up data.

So I try this:

rsync -avz --exclude=backups/ / /backups/

That would work, except the /dir2/backups directory would also be skipped.

Does anybody know of a way to be more specific about a directory you want skipped.

To be more clear about what it is I want to do...

I want to backup my entire hard drive, skipping things like /proc, /mnt, /dev, and the /backups directory I'll be making. I want to specifically exclude those directories, rather than specifically including the directories I want.

Any help would be appreciated. Let me know if this is not clear and I will try and explain better.

Thanks in advance,

[dylunio]

try

rsync -avz --exclude=/backups/ / /backups/

that states to exclude the backups directory in / .

[EndianX]

Humph.

I tried that in my testing (a subset of directories) and it wasn't working. But since you said it would work I tried it on the real thing ( on / ) and it worked. I now have a script to make a copy of my drive, and a script to resync my files with it.

Thank you for the help!