Sometimes when we are making backups on our files, and specially if you are a Node.js developer, you’ll suffer whilst copying your repositories to another place for making a backup. (Provided you don’t have git for all your repositories)
Just do:
rsync -av --exclude 'node_modules' source destination
And you are set. You could also exclude some other things like adding adding gitignore rules
rsync -av --filter=":- .gitignore" source destination