Including and excluding files¶

By default ezbak backs up every regular file under your source paths. Two regular expressions narrow that selection. A small set of noise files is always skipped, and ezbak never follows a symlink.

Always-excluded files¶

ezbak never archives these names, whatever else you configure:

• .DS_Store
• @eaDir
• .Trashes
• __pycache__
• Thumbs.db
• IconCache.db

These are operating-system and tooling artifacts. They add noise to a backup, and you never need to restore them.

Include and exclude regular expressions¶

Two options filter the file list. ezbak matches each one against the path of the file:

• include_regex backs up only the files whose path matches the pattern.
• exclude_regex skips the files whose path matches the pattern.

from pathlib import Path
from ezbak import EZBak, BackupConfig

EZBak(
    BackupConfig(
        name="logs",
        source_paths=[Path("/var/log")],
        storage_paths=[Path("/backups")],
        include_regex=r"\.log$",   # only .log files
        exclude_regex=r"debug",    # skip anything matching "debug"
        keep_last=10,
    )
)

On the command line, the same options are create --include-regex (-i) and create --exclude-regex (-e). In the environment they are EZBAK_INCLUDE_REGEX and EZBAK_EXCLUDE_REGEX.

Both options take a standard Python regular expression, matched against the file path. \.log$ matches a path that ends in .log. debug matches any path that contains the substring debug.