Exclude hidden files/folders from backup

[Dene Stringfellow]

Thanks Bill, Ken and  Patrick for your input.

I've done the following:

1)
Following Bill's advice - I presumed Ken's find command is what Bill
meant by using the depth and file type parameters.

2)
Following Ken's advice I ran the command:

find ./ ! -type f ! -type d -exec ls -l {} \;       (BTW - how would I
reverse this?)

firstly from:
/root - which only returned the following 3 entries:

lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           13 Mar  7 18:08
./.kde/tmp-RCL242 -> /tmp/kde-root
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           17 Mar  7 18:08
./.kde/socket-RCL242 -> /tmp/ksocket-root
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           27 Mar 31 12:00
./.DCOPserver_RCL242_:0 -> /root/.DCOPserver_RCL242__0

/ - which returned thousands of entries (- too many to list) which
happily spooled past the screen for about 15 minutes until it
finished!!!!

/home (- the directory I want to back up) - returned no entries at all!

3)
Following Patrick's advice I ran the command:

tar --exclude .AppleDouble --exclude .AppleDesktop -cvf /dev/null /home

The command listed all the files to be backed up within a minute without
stalling or locking up!!!

I then tried above command replacing /dev/null with /dev/st0:
Excruciatingly slow!!!
It was backing up the first sub directory (total 54.4Mb) and had only
managed to backup the first 30 or so files  - nothing bigger than 700Kb!
I decided to login to another terminal under X to check on the progress
and file sizes - big mistake! This just locked up the new terminal so I
had to force a reboot! I worked out that the system had probably only
managed to backup about 5.5Mb after about an hour!!!!

and /dev/nst0:
Excruciatingly slow!!!
Exactly the same result as with /dev/st0! I used a shell in another
terminal to kill the process to avoid having to reboot this time.

At around 5Mb/hour this isn't going to backup the server data overnight!!!

As I mentioned before, there is no problem backing up to this tape drive
using Retrospect under MacOS 9 - 367Mb backed up and verified in about
26 minutes or so!

Any further thoughts or suggestions welcomed.

Thanks again.

Dene Stringfellow