Ignore “node_modules” Directories in Deja-Dup

In this post, I’d share my way to ignore node_modules folders from backing up with Deja-Dep(Backups).

Image of Deja-Dup (Backups) app

Motivation

I’m using Deja-Dup (Backups) in my Ubuntu 22.04 to backup files. While backing up, many directories and sub-directories named “node_modules” are backed up. Their sizes are sometimes up to 500MB for one directory. And they are easily downloadable again. So I wanted to exclude these files.

Setting

Ignore setting is available in Deja Dup, but the problem is that node_modules directories are created and destroyed so often. Therefore, I needed general settings.

(This does not work) First, I set many layers of directories on the Backups setting using dconf. This did not work. I tried to set it using asterisks, like */*/node_modules , which did not work.

This does not work…

(This works) Finally, I reached the way to put .deja-dup-ignore empty-file in each node_modules/ directory.

find ~/ -name node_modules -prune -exec touch {}/.deja-dup-ignore \;

The command

• finds all the directories with node_modules/ (-prune stops searching the tree branch when finds first node_modules/)
• touch to create .deja-dup-ignore file in each found directory

CRON daily command

I use the CRON schedule to run this command every day. By this, I don’t need to care about which directories are set or not for my weekly backups.

5 0 * * * find ~/ -name  node_modules -prune -exec touch {}/.deja-dup-ignore \;

Summary

By regularly creating the .deja-dup-ignore file, we can avoid backing up unwanted node_modules directories.

Note

You can find all of .deja-dup-ignore using this command.

find ~/ -name .deja-dup-ignore