Zend certified PHP/Magento developer

trouble with spaces in environment variable in rsync script on MacOS

I have a Bash script that I plan to run for daily backups (my HOME is /Volumes/Norman Data/me):

#!/bin/bash

# Halt the script on any errors.
set -e

# Remote server where
remote_server="example.com"

# Destination Folder on Remote Server
target_path="backup/"

# User (with sshy key) on remote server
usr="me"


# ${HOME} evaluates to '/Volumes/Norman Data/me'
# A list of absolute paths to backup. 
include_paths=(
  # "~/.ssh"
  # "~/.bash_history"
  "${HOME}/.bash_profile"
  # "~/.vimrc"
  # "~/.gitconfig"
  # "~/.gitignore"
  # "~/.zshrc"
  # "~/Artifacts"
  "${HOME}/Documents --exclude=remote"
  # "~/Downloads"
  # "~/Desktop"
  # "~/Pictures"
  # "~/Projects --exclude 'remote'"
  # "~/Movies"
)

# A list of folder names and files to exclude.
exclude_paths=(
  ".bundle"
  "node_modules"
  "tmp"
)

# Passing list of paths to exclude
for item in "${exclude_paths[@]}"
do
  exclude_flags="${exclude_flags} --exclude=${item}"
done

# Passing list of paths to copy
for item in "${include_paths[@]}"
do
  include_args="${include_args} '${item}'"
done


str="rsync -auvzP ${exclude_flags} ${include_args} ${usr}@${remote_server}:${target_path}"
echo "Running: ${str}"
${str}

Running that results in:

building file list ... 
rsync: link_stat "/Volumes/Norman" failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync: link_stat "/Volumes/Norman Data/me/Data/me/.bash_profile" failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync: link_stat "/Volumes/Norman" failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync: link_stat "/Volumes/Norman Data/me/Data/me/Documents" failed: No such file or directory (2)
0 files to consider

sent 29 bytes  received 20 bytes  32.67 bytes/sec
total size is 0  speedup is 0.00
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at 
/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/rsync/rsync-52/rsync/main.c(996) [sender=2.6.9]

As far as I can tell, the space in the value of my HOME is causing problems. I thought quoting it like "${HOME}/.bash_profile" would take care of the spaces. And it seems to, kind of. By this I mean, the value I get from echo "Running: ${str}" is

rsync -auvzP  --exclude=.bundle --exclude=node_modules --exclude=tmp  '/Volumes/Norman Data/me/.bash_profile' '/Volumes/Norman Data/me/Documents' --exclude=remote me@example.com:backup/

And when I run that directly in the terminal or paste it in the script (in place of ${str}, it works as expected. The errors above only happen when using the variable.

Can’t seem to figure out what I’m missing here. Can anyone shed some light?

** script adapted from https://gitlab.com/ramawat/randomhacks/blob/master/backup_script.txt