Is there a flag that I could set on a file so that it will not be copied? I have a lot of Virtual environments on my computer and it would be immensely helpful to flag a directory so that itself and its contents will not be copied due to the amount of files contained in the virtual environment. I regularly try to backup my computer through aliases in my .bashrc. I know that I could try exclude directories in the command line when using file copying utilities but that could become a little too arduous with the amount of virtual environments that I have.
Not with copy, but rsync has --exclude option.
rsync -varoglAX --exclude "/this/folder" --exclude "/that/folder" /back/this/up /target/location