rsync not working - want to copy only certain subdirectories and files

Question

Hi let's say I have a directory like this:

/
    my_work
               /dir1
                    keepdir1.ddd
                    keepdir2.ddd
                    file.cfg
                    (lots of files and directories I don't want)
               /dir2
                    (same layout as dir 1)

So I want to copy the directory "my_work" and all of the "dir1", "dir2", etc sub directories. But within each of those I want to keep only certain files, and certain directories. In the directories I keep I want to recursively include everything.

Here's what I've tried so far but nothing seems to copy:

rsync -rl --include-from=~/rsync_include /my_work ~/backup

And the contents of rsync_include are:

+ *file.cfg
+ *keepdir*/*
- *

Update:

If I run with rsync -rvvl I get:

sending incremental file list
[sender] hiding directory my_work because of pattern *
delta-transmission disabled for local transfer or --whole-file
total: matches=0  hash_hits=0  false_alarms=0 data=0

sent 10 bytes  received 12 bytes  44.00 bytes/sec
total size is 0  speedup is 0.00

Answer 1

The final - * is ignoring everything that hasn't explicitly matched one of the preceding rules. This is what you want, but because the top level folders don't match, rsync won't even descend into them, so it won't have a chance to match the file patterns you've specified.

If you add:

+ my_work/
+ my_work/dir*

explicitly to the top of the file, then it should work.