problem with tar exclusion

[Nokobon]

Hello,
I want to do a backup of my whole system with tar to an external hard drive, mounted under /mnt.
As there are other backups on this external hd and I don't want to back them up again, I tried to exclude this hd from the backup.

I tried the exclude option of tar:

tar -cvf /mnt/backup.tar / --exclude=/mnt

as well as an external exclude file:

tar -cvf /mnt/backup.tar / -X /var/exclude

The exclude file contains:

/mnt/*

Neither of those methods worked...everything under /mnt was backed up.

Do I miss anything trivial?
I hope you can help me...

Thanks,
Nokobon

 

[DutchDaemon]

Try keeping the options at the front, i.e. before the target and destination declarations.

 

[Nokobon]

Try keeping the options at the front, i.e. before the target and destination declarations.

Thank you, DutchDaemon!

I tried

tar -cvf /mnt/backup.tar --exclude=/mnt /

...works perfectly.

Sometimes solutions are so easy. I'm a bit ashamed of starting a new thread because of this xD

 

[vivek]

Most BSD stuff works in predeined order:

cp -a /src /dest

Gnu stuff accepts command line in any way:

cp  /src -a /dest 
cp  /src -a /dest  -v

 

[Nokobon]

Most BSD stuff works in predeined order:

cp -a /src /dest

Gnu stuff accepts command line in any way:

cp  /src -a /dest 
cp  /src -a /dest  -v

Ah, thanks for that info.
But when I use tar with -f it's the reverse order...first destiny, then source.

 

[DutchDaemon]

That's confusing

With tar -c (create an archive), -f denotes 'the file to write to', so it's the destination where you archived files will end up.

With tar -x (extract an archive), -f denotes 'the file to extract from', so it's the source where your archived files will be taken from.

What you can say, is that -f always denotes the archive.

 

[Nokobon]

What you can say, is that -f always denotes the archive.

Yeah right, that sounds less confusing