Ubuntu 16.04 rsync – doing backups of the NAS server, can I tell it to exclude all the .Trash directories

I use my NAS to back up several smaller systems that monitor the solar plant, using rsync. It works great. Now I want to back up the entire NAS drive.

There are subdirectories for each linux machine – 8 of them.

As I have learned more and tuned my exclusions I see a whole lot of leftovers that I forgot to exclude earlier.

In the past I excluded the /lost+found directories but didn't think about /.trash-1000 and now there are a lot of them.

Simply adding them to the --exclude list, even with --delete doesn't delete them because exclude makes the rsync program skip them entirely.

It does not operate the same way Robocopy /MIR does.

So let's start with .Trash and I think the answer will help me if I find others that I originally forgot to exclude.

Obviously, one solution is to delete the entire directory for each server in turn and then re-run a full rsync with the new set of exclusions.

But that is a lot of work, to say the least.

So my question is, when I make a full rsync of the NAS drive, is there a generic way to exclude all .Trash-1000 folders? If this works, I may swap the drives and resume operations with the cleaner one.

I'm looking for something like this:

--exclude="*.Trash*"

…so it would not copy them, regardless of their location in the directory structure.

I really want to know how to do this with rsync, and am looking for a solution to the problem of how adding excludes causes rsync to skip them rather than deleting them.

Alternatively, instead of doing it during the rsyncs, I would welcome an answer that would show me how to seek and destroy these directories on the original NAS drive.

rsync – How to make it delete directories or files recently added to the exclusions list