So of course I turned it into a script. This script.

#!/bin/bash



EXCLUDES=`mktemp --tmpdir=/tmp rsyncex.XXXXXX`

RSYNCFLAGS="-q"



while getopts "v" Option

do

    case $Option in

    v   )   RSYNCFLAGS='-v';;

    *   )   echo "Only know -v for verbose" ;;

    esac

done

        

(

cat <<'EOL'

*.lock

/proc/*

/sys/*

*/tiger/work/*

*/nagios3/spool/*

tmp/*

/tmp/*

/opt/splunk/var/*

/var/www/munin/*

EOL

) > ${EXCLUDES}



# as an idle job if you can

/usr/bin/ionice -c 3 -t \

    /usr/bin/rsync -xa ${RSYNCFLAGS} --links \

        --exclude-from=${EXCLUDES}  --delete / /mnt/backup



rm ${EXCLUDES}

The points at which you would want to modify it for your own use should be obvious, if not the point of why you would want to use it at all.