Excluding files/folders using tar is very straight forward.
Assuming we have a directory tree similar to this in Linux
-/home/cliper/ |--- folder/ |--- file1 |--- file2 |--- folder
and we want to exclude file2 and folder to the archive, then command would be like:
tar –czpf filename.tgz --exclude=/home/cliper/folder/file2 --exclude=/home/cliper/folder/folder