My main drive’s RAID configuration protects me against drive failures, but it doesn’t protect me against accidentally deleting a file. For that, I use the backup2l program to periodically backup my files to a third hard drive.
backup2l has a fairly easy way to ignore a file or directory: If the name of its path includes “.nobackup” anywhere in it, then that file or directory won’t be backed up. However, it’s ugly to have to look at “.nobackup” in directory names. Also, some directories that you don’t want to back up can’t be renamed. For example, your virtual machine manager may keep virtual images, which are very large, in a directory that it expects to have a certain name. You can’t just rename the directory to end in “.nobackup”, or the virtual machine manager won’t be able to find the images.
The workaround is simple. Go ahead and rename the directory to include “.nobackup”. Also, start it with a “.” so it will be hidden:
mv my_big_directory .my_big_directory.nobackup
Now create a symlink to the directory so it can be referenced with its original name:
ln -s .my_big_directory.nobackup my_big_directory
You will see the symlink when you use “ls -l”:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 wayne wayne 24 Aug 28 10:02 my_big_directory -> .my_big_directory.nobackup
but otherwise the directory will function the same as it did before–except that it won’t be backed up by backup2l.