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I'm scheduling my backups with Deja Dup and I'd like to know if hidden folders in the home directory, such as .thunderbird, will be included in my backups?

My question comes from the fact that my home folder size is 30Gb big, whereas my latest backup is smaller than 400Mb, so I have doubts.

Ubuntu 14.04

Thanks!

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  • 1
    answers.launchpad.net/deja-dup/+question/148826 askubuntu.com/questions/103111/…
    – Rinzwind
    Apr 1, 2016 at 9:02
  • And the answer is probably: compression.
    – Rinzwind
    Apr 1, 2016 at 9:03
  • Thank you. That's some incredible compression. I have selected really important hidden folders to be on the safer side.
    – Joe
    Apr 1, 2016 at 9:36
  • 2
    Try a restore on a file in one of the folders and see.
    – Organic Marble
    Apr 1, 2016 at 11:00
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    I just did it and it indeed backed up all the hidden folders except the exceptions. Thanks for the suggestion!
    – Joe
    Apr 11, 2016 at 9:05

1 Answer 1

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It indeed is included. If you want to exclude them, simply edit the dconf database value for exclude-list in org/gnome/deja-dup to include $HOME/.* as one of the exclusions. The * operator means "All", which ensures that any hidden directory, or in other words, any directory whose name starts with ., is excluded.

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  • Note that compression is not something to rely on for saving space. If your directory grows over 150GB, and the compression decreases the size of the backup by the same ratio, you will end up with about 2GB of backup, which could be a headache to restore especially if you have a slow Internet connection.
    – Hassan Khalloof
    Sep 15, 2021 at 17:29

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