Prevent file from being overwritten on deploy?

I am using web deploy to push changes to my Web Site Project (not a web application) from my development machine to my staging server. I would like to push any files that are different to the staging server except for one particular file (lets call it myFile.whatever)

So far I have tried editing the 

C:\Program Files\IIS\Microsoft Web Deploy V3\msdeploy.exe.config

 file to look like so:

<configuration><startup><supportedRuntimeversion="v2.0.50727"/><supportedRuntimeversion="v4.0"/></startup><rules><------------ ADDED THIS NODE<rulename="skipConfig"type="Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentSkipRuleHandler"objectName="filePath"skipAction="Delete"absolutePath="C:\inetpub\wwwroot\MyProject\myFile.whatever"/></rules></configuration>

But it is still overwriting the file in question on my staging server. I started by editing the msdeploy.exe.config on my dev machine and when that didn't work I updated the msdeploy.exe.config on my staging server as well, but again, still not working.

Am I going about this wrong? Any suggestions on preventing this file from being overwritten?