--exclude argument not working?

[dolf-s]

Hi all,
I'm trying to exclude a bunch of .mp4 files from a backup. No matter what I try, I can't get these files to be excluded from the backup.

I'm using docker compose and below is a snippet from my compose file. I've also tried including the full path ('/source/shinobi/**/*.mp4') and tried using an exclude file, but nothing seems to force the exclusion of the mp4 files from ending up in the backup. I was hoping that the --verbose flag would shed more light on what commands are actually passed to the container but unfortunately it's not visible in the logs.

Am I doing something wrong perhaps?

RESTIC_BACKUP_ARGS: >- --tag shinobi --exclude='*.mp4' --verbose

[djmaze]

@dolf-s It looks like everything is on one line here. Then the >- is not needed and may do harm. Other than that, it looks correct.

[dolf-s]

It looks that way, but it's the way the copy-paste turned out. I tried it on one line first, without the >- like this:
RESTIC_BACKUP_ARGS: --tag shinobi --exclude='*.mp4' --verbose

Later I tried it as per your compose example yml:
RESTIC_BACKUP_ARGS: >- --tag shinobi --exclude='*.mp4' --verbose

[djmaze]

Hmm. Maybe you have an older version of the image which did not yet support RESTIC_BACKUP_ARGS. Did you pull the latest image or do you use at least the 1.2.0 release?

[ThomDietrich]

What does not work exactly? When you run the image you should see the command as it is executed. Does it look correct to you?

Maybe to help you, here is one of my working configs:

environment:
     ...
      RESTIC_BACKUP_ARGS: >-
        --tag resticker
        --verbose
      RESTIC_FORGET_ARGS: --keep-last 3 --keep-daily 7 --keep-weekly 5 --keep-monthly 12 --keep-yearly 3
      TZ: Europe/Berlin

Your yaml has to be correct. Your second isn't and the different characters in your first might create issues. What do you see when you execute docker-compose config?

[dolf-s]

Below is the result of docker-compose config. What fails is that the backups include mp4 files, which I want to exclude from the backup. The 'tag' and 'verbose' arguments seem to be passed correctly. One thing that struck me is that the mp4 files show as executable files from the command line. I guess it is irrelevant for the --exclude argument, but just mentioning it just in case.

 resticker:
    container_name: resticker-shinobi
    environment:
      B2_ACCOUNT_ID: ****************
      B2_ACCOUNT_KEY: ***************
      BACKUP_CRON: 0 20 2 * * *
      POST_COMMANDS_EXIT: docker start shinobi
      PRE_COMMANDS: docker stop shinobi
      RESTIC_BACKUP_ARGS: --tag shinobi  --exclude='*.mp4'  --verbose
      RESTIC_BACKUP_SOURCES: /source/shinobi
      RESTIC_FORGET_ARGS: --tag shinobi --keep-last 10 --keep-daily 1
      RESTIC_PASSWORD: ***************
      RESTIC_REPOSITORY: ***************
      RUN_ON_STARTUP: "true"
      TZ: Europe/Amsterdam
    hostname: home-server
    image: mazzolino/restic
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
    - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:rw
    - /home/dolf/docker/shared/resticker:/var/log:rw
    - /home/dolf/docker/shinobi:/source/shinobi:ro

[ThomDietrich]

Your configuration and command looks all good to me. Imho this is not a resticker problem but directly related to your use of restic. According to the restic documentation you are doing everything right. My configurations look similar but I do not wildcards. In some environements quotes influence globbing. Please check if it works with "double quotes". This is my last idea. Did you test excluding folders? That certainly works for me.

[dolf-s]

I found something interesting: the mp4 files have 775 permissions. If I change the permission to 664 the exclude flag works as expected. Unfortunately I can't control the file permissions when the files are created.

Then I changed the --exclude flag to --iexclude and now it works as intended (it skips the mp4 files). Hope this is useful for anyone else having the same issue.

[dolf-s]

After some trial and error, here is what finally made it work correctly. The trick is not to escape the exclude argument. The syntax below is correct. This is currently not correctly stated under 'configuration options' in the readme.md.

RESTIC_BACKUP_ARGS: --exclude= *.mp4

[pfennig42]

I also spend some time with this thing. It also appears, if a file in the docker-compose is specified.
--exclude-file='/data/exclude.txt' would not work, but --exclude-file=/data/exclude.txt does.

IMO it could be good to add a hint in the Readme about it. What dou you think @djmaze ?