I'm about to do an upgrade to my LinHES box, so I thought I'd do an backup first as usual. However this time I ran mythbackup from a terminal rather than the frontend, and I noticed a lot of things being backed up that I dont think need to be.

For example:
./home/mythtv/.dvdcss/BLACK_BELT_GRADING_12_DEC_2007-2007123010224400/
./home/mythtv/.mythtv/themecache/blue-abstract-wide.720.576/-myth-video-.covers-Outro.mkv.png--66x139.png
/home/mythtv/.mythtv/osdcache/cache_+usr+share+mythtv+themes+blootube-osd+osd-alert.png@1.12188_1_-1_-1

Do I/we really need to backup all these caches?

I've noticed that in /usr/LH/bin/backupcommon there are BLACK_LIST and IGNORE_LIST entries, but what is the difference? Will adding the cache directories prevent them from being backed up or from being restored?

_________________
Paul Turpie
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<--Is your location in your profile? Why not?

The backup is inclusive, there are provisions to add extra files and directories, but none to exclude them.

The black list and the ignore list are used at restore time, the first one blocks the restore from extracting certain files which are known to be problematic, the second tells the verification to ignore differences in certain files. The comments in the code even say this...

If you don't want certain things included in the backup your best bet is to clean them up before running it.