Creating a .tar.gz Backup on Linux

Posted by arkin
February 25, 2008

Very useful commmand to make a .tar.gz compressed backup of important directories.

tar stands for tape archive which can be used to turn many files and directories into a single file, great for backup and storage.

The syntax:

tar [-options] /directory/of/new/file.tar /files/to/backup/*

So, in this example, we want to backup /var/www to /var/backup.tar.gz (.gz are further compressed).

We would use this command:

tar -pczf /var/backup.tar.gz /var/www/*

What the options mean:

-f = read to/from the named file (instead of the device /tape)
-t = list contents of .tar file
-p = maintain permissions (users/groups)
-r = append to a .tar file
-v = verbose (tells you everything its doing)
-x = extract contents of .tar file
-z = compress files (not so useful for minc files)

Then, if we wanted to extract the backup.

tar -zxvf backup.tar.gz

Hope this helps, very useful command.
Especially if you can run it on a cronjob.

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