Specifying remote directories to be excluded from rsnapshot backup

There is a fourth field for the backup line, which can be used for such tasks. So your line should look like follows.

backup tom@laptop:/home/tom/ laptop/ exclude=/home/tom/music

You can add more per backup options by separating these with a comma. For further reading consult the man page of rsnapshot.

Since this is the top result for my google search, I think the following might help others too:

Thomas' command works, but it removes all globally defined exclude directives in /etc/rsnapshot.conf

In order to keep existing excludes you can use the following

backup tom@laptop:/home/tom/ laptop/ +rsync_long_args=--exclude=/home/tom/music