I’ve had a few occasions where Borg Backup has reported back an error because the file couldn’t be accessed. Often it’s a Docker created directory owned by root. I often won’t even care about backing those directories up so it’s handy to specify a list of files to exclude from the backup.

Here’s an example command including the --exclude-from flag which specifies the path to the exclusion file.

borg create \
	--verbose \
	--debug \
	--show-rc \
	--progress \
	--stats \
	--exclude-from exclude.txt \
	borg::$(date +\%Y\%m\%d\%H\%M\%S) <path-to-backup>

The file itself is a simple plain-text list of paths to files/directories you want to exclude.

Example contents:

/home/user/example.txt
/etc/config/settings.ini
/usr/local/bin
/mnt/storage