Re: question about creation of archives

[Graham Percival <gperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 05:51:02PM -0700, Colin Percival wrote:
> The 'include' directive is kind of broken.  Or rather, it works,
> but the situations where it's useful are so rare that it confuses
> people more than it helps them.

In more detail, "include" is inherited from BSD tar(1).

http://www.tarsnap.com/selecting-files.html
- Any include option will back up only those files and directories.
- The process of recursing into subdirectories is also affected.  Adding this
  to the config file:
      include /home
  and then attempting to back up / results in **nothing** being backed up.

This is very counter-intuitive, but we are reluctant to diverge from tar(1)
unless we have a very good reason.

Cheers,
- Graham