I do have an improved version of the official Octothorpes WordPress plugin, but unfortunately the original authors have refused to open-source it, and without an open source license attached to the original files I built on, I can't share it. <rant>I have to express some frustration. I'm extremely disappointed that Octothorpes do not seem to work at all. The whole project is a brilliant idea—I went for it hook, line, and sinker. In fact, I liked it so much that I immediately started working on improving things, such as their extremely lacking WordPress integration plugin... so eagerly, in fact, that I put in a lot of work before testing whether Octothorpes actually work at all. And it appears that they don't. At least, I couldn't ever get them to, despite sinking several long nights into it. Disappointingly, I had to add a lot of unneeded extra structure to my site code to even try and get Octothorpes working—contrary to what the documentation suggested—and even after doing everything right, as confirmed by their debugging tool, my Octothorpes never appeared on their server. Given that I never got it to work and couldn't find anyone who was able to assist me, all the complexity I had to add to my site in the effort—such as serving Octothorpe-specific page versions, like the one you are looking at right now—became needless cruft. So after a few very long nights of fruitlessly spinning my wheels, I've given up, and removed it all again. I have to add that I'm disappointed. I'm not used to showing up enthusiastic to contribute to an open-source project and so quickly winding up walking away with absolutely nothing, no involvement, no ability to use or run it, no interest in my desire to contribute (even code I've already finished!), nothing. Maybe I've been lucky before now. Octothorpes are a brilliant idea, in concept. I hope they work someday, and become a project that might see wide adoption and contribution by enthusiastic developers. (And that the main devs see the value in WordPress plugin developers expressing an interest in authoring OP integrations with WordPress... 43% of the world's websites can't be wrong...) Sorry to rant, but, my site, my several nights of work lost, my prerogative to express it.</rant>Frustrated rant about it here, click to read...
Seeing as how this Octothorpe-compliant low-bandwidth page version serves no purpose anymore (and doesn't contain any code related to the Octothorpe service anymore, except for noticing visitors using URLs referencing it, in order to show this message), you probably want to view the original page in its complete technicolor glory at https://michaelkupietz.com/speeding-up-rsnapshot-rsync-by-removing-wildcard-paths-from-exclude/.
I removed a bunch of wildcard paths from rsnapshot.conf's exclude, and suddenly tonight my backup ran in a few minutes instead of taking over a day like it usually does.
Interesting, I've been looking off and on for at least the better part of a year for ways to lighten the load of rsnapshot's under-the-hood rsync backup commands, which reliably took up about half my CPU power almost continuously, and never found this tip before. You can see, plenty of wildcard paths removed, plus a few other things.
Here's a diff, rsnapshot.conf before changes (<) vs after (>):
< verbose 1
---
> verbose 4
120c120
< loglevel 2
---
> loglevel 4
143a144,146
> rsync_short_args -Wa
> #-W is transfer whole files without prescan, recommended for performance by https://serverfault.com/questions/639458/rsync-taking-100-of-cpu-and-hours-to-complete
> #NOTE: if you set the above short args, include 'a' manually! It's needed!
174,177c177,180
< exclude '*log.*.gz'
< exclude '*log.gz'
< exclude 'home/*/tmp'
< exclude '/tmp'
---
> exclude 'log.*.gz'
> exclude 'log.gz'
> exclude 'home/[Logged In Users Only]/tmp'
> #exclude '/tmp'
178a182,184
> exclude '/root/downloads'
> exclude '/root/.claude'
> exclude '/root/.mozilla'
191,201c197,217
< exclude '/dev/*'
< exclude '/home/*/.gvfs'
< exclude '/home/*/.mozilla/firefox/*/Cache'
< exclude '/home/*/.cache/chromium'
< exclude '/home/*/.thumbnails'
< exclude '/media/*'
< exclude '/mnt/*'
< exclude '/proc/*'
< exclude '/sys/*'
< exclude '/tmp/*'
< exclude '/home/*/.local/share/Trash'
---
> #exclude '/dev/*'
> #was exclude '/home/*/.gvfs'
> exclude '.gvfs'
> exclude '.mozilla/firefox/*/Cache'
> exclude '.cache/chromium'
> exclude '.thumbnails'
> #last 3 were
> #exclude '/home/*/.mozilla/*/Cache'
> #exclude '/home/*/.cache'
> #exclude '/home/*/.thumbnails'
> #
> #exclude '/home/*/.mozilla/firefox/*/Cache'
> #exclude '/home/*/.cache/chromium'
> #exclude '/home/*/.thumbnails'
> #exclude '/media/*'
> #exclude '/mnt/*'
> #exclude '/proc/*'
> #exclude '/sys/*'
> #exclude '/tmp/*'
> exclude '.local/share/Trash'
> #was exclude '/home/*/.local/share/Trash'
203,213c219,234
< exclude '/var/run/*'
< exclude '/var/lock/*'
< exclude '/lib/modules/*/volatile/.mounted'
< exclude '/var/cache/apt/archives/*'
< exclude '/home/*/.mozilla/*/Cache'
< exclude '/home/*/.cache'
< exclude '/home/*/.thumbnails'
< exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/*'
< exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/data/cache/*'
< exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/.cursor-server/*'
< exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/.wp-cli/*'
---
> exclude '/var/run'
> #was exclude '/var/run/*'
> exclude '/var/lock'
> #was exclude '/var/lock/*'
> #exclude '/lib/modules/*/volatile/.mounted'
> exclude '/var/cache/'
> #was exclude '/var/cache/apt/archives/*'
> exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]'
> exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/data/cache'
> exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/.cursor-server'
> exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/.wp-cli'
> #last 4 were:
> #exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/public_html/genEmail logs/*'
> #exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/public_html/FrRSS47/data/cache/*'
> #exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/.cursor-server/*'
> #exclude '/home/[Logged In Users Only]/.wp-cli/*'
224c245,246
< exclude_file /home/[Logged In Users Only]/debug.log
---
> #exclude_file /home/[Logged In Users Only]/debug.log
> #above commented out because seemed to cause problems if debug.log didn't exist. Test it out.
Content originally from https://michaelkupietz.com/speeding-up-rsnapshot-rsync-by-removing-wildcard-paths-from-exclude/. © copyright 2025 Michael E. Kupietz