Ubuntu – How to exclude all hidden files and folders from duplicity backup

As you may have guessed, duplicity asks for a directory as the second argument when restoring files. According to man duplicity:

duplicity [restore] [options] [--file-to-restore <relpath>] [--time time] source_url target_directory

...
If we wanted to restore just the file "Mail/article" in /home/me as it was three days ago into /home/me/restored_file:

duplicity -t 3D --file-to-restore Mail/article
sftp://uid@other.host/some_dir /home/me/restored_file

So, in your case, you would use:

duplicity restore --no-encryption --file-to-restore hecatombe.txt "file:///media/TOSHIBA EXT/" "/home/rch/"

You can edit the exclude list like:

gsettings get org.gnome.DejaDup exclude-list
# remove comment to execute
# gsettings set org.gnome.DejaDup exclude-list ['path1', 'path2']

Source: https://answers.launchpad.net/deja-dup/+question/280954

I tried to add patterns like '**/.git' and '**/build' into that list, like this:

gsettings get org.gnome.DejaDup exclude-list > exclude-list
gedit exclude-list
gsettings set org.gnome.DejaDup exclude-list "`cat exclude-list`"

But to me it seems like the **'s were not passed to duplicity. So instead I ended up doing seaches like

locate "/home/*/.svn"
locate "/home/*/build"

and added them to the exclude-list manually