Backing up with tar

[jeep]

Hi

I'm backing up our sites with some cron jobs... the bit in question is...

/bin/tar -cf sitebackup.tar /big/dom/xsite/www/*

I've looked at UNIX in a nutshell and the man pages but can't figure out how to have all of the www/ directory stored in the archive EXCEPT some subdirectories (in my case ../www/galleries/ or ../www/files/).

Any ideas on how to do this???

Jason

[Kevin]

Jason,
The easiest way is to create an exclude file which is just a plain text file containing a list of the files you do not want to backup. Then you use the --exclude-from option on tar (see man tar for more info).

Btw, you can also use the -z parameter on tar command to compress the archive with gzip to save space since tar by itself is not compressed.

--
Kevin

[jeep]

Doh! Well that exclude-from option does appear if you look at man tar on the FQ systems. I was looking at the man pages on MacOS X which are rather more concise and refer (it would seem) to the BSD version and not a GNU one.

Thanks for the -z option, actually I'm bzipping them as it's more efficient ie smaller files to download.

regards,
Jason

[Terra]

I was looking at the man pages on MacOS X which are rather more concise

If you would like more detailed information about 'tar' on our servers, then try:
$ info tar

The 'tar' manual page itself is meant to be short, sweet, and too the point to serve as a quick reference... The Info page has a more user friendly guide...

--
Terra
--if you think 'tar' switches are abundant - take a look at 'cpio' or 'rsync' one day--
FutureQuest

[JRepici]

Got it working.

Not sure exactly why I got this to work. One thing I did learn while experiminting on my own is that wildcards continue to reference the directory you started in even after a -C, so "... -C ..\otherDir\ *" looks in the "otherDir" for those filenames it found in the directory where you started tar (not the filenames it finds in the otherDir directory that you switched to).


-jr