Deja Dup (Backups) - default excluded directories

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Hi,
I am currently testing Deja Dup and Pika Backup. My question is related to size of the backup. I have excluded only a few basic directories in Deja Dup (like Downloads) and the backup has 17 GB. However, in Pika I have done more thorough job of finding and limiting the big unnecessary directories = I limited more, but the backup has 31 GB.

What does Deja Dup exclude by default? I have found out, that my Deja Dup, for example, excluded .local/share/Steam directory. But I found out I have some saves in there, so I want this to be backed up by default. In pika I have hand picked the directories under Steam that are binaries and stuff that I don’t need to backup.

Can I find somewhere a list of these default exclusions?

Thank you.

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Yeah absolutely - that info should be in two places:

  • in the Preferences dialog, under the Folders tab, there should be a little help icon to the right of the “folders to ignore” header. Clicking that should show the list of excluded folders.
  • That same list should also be in the Help documentation under the Preferences section (press F1 to open help or go to the main menu and click Help)
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Thank you.
The .local/share/Steam is not there. What could be the reason for that? I checked permissions of that directory and it has rwx for user (me) and than nothing for group and others - can this be the reason?

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Does ~/.steam/root point there?

ls -l ~/.steam/root

It often does - where Steam puts things has changed over time and this symlink is afaict the canonical way to find out where Steam files are.

Deja Dup will follow that symlink when excluding folders.

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Aha, you are right, thank you! And thank you for taking care of Deja Dup :slight_smile:

Also you might wanna look into the game saves backups: e.g. in the steam folder in userdata I have Baldur’s Gate saves (and they are growing too big for steam cloud). I also read that some game backups are in steamapps/compatdata/pfx though I don’t know what exactly. (more context here)

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The steam exclude is tricky. See some conversation around it here:

Basically, if there was a foolproof way of excluding just the downloaded / “cached” data and include the save data that the user might care about, I’m very interested in doing that.

But steam interweaves that stuff. And most user save data is in Steam cloud, so my position has so far been “let’s not waste the user’s location space with yet another copy of Grand Theft Auto” - but it’s an open discussion.

Honestly, the steam folder is just a huge mess :disappointed:

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For Pika Backup, you can find the available excludes here. Unfortunately it is Rust code, but it’s not too hard to read.

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I understand. And its totally up to you. I think there should at least be an alert popup on first backup saying that steam is not included by default and that if there is something user wants to be preserved in the backup its up to the user. Or something like that. Especially because this is very user (beginer level) friendly, this should be there.

Just fyi I am also trying Pika and there I just excluded the biggest “offenders”:
.local/share/Steam/package
.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common
.local/share/Steam/ubuntu[0-9_]+

I read that its not worth picking over the small directories and choosing if I need it, so I just went over the big ones and the above three rules work for me well.

Edit: “not included” instead of “included”

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Thank you. As a developer myself, and rust as a hobby language, this is ok :blush: