Backup unix files and folders using tar - compress and backup files

Because of various reasons some of which hearken back to the era of tape drives, Unix uses a program named tar to archive data, which can then be compressed with a compression program like gzip, bzip2, 7zip, etc.



In order to "zip" a directory, the correct command would be



tar -zcvf archive.tar.gz directory/

This will tell tar to c (create) an archive from the files in directory (tar is recursive by default), compress it using the z (gzip) algorithm, store the output as a f (file) named archive.tar.gz, and v (verbosely) list all the files it adds to the archive.



To decompress and unpack the archive into the current directory you would use



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ARCHIVE FOLDER CONTENTS & CREATE NEW BACKUP FILE:

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atoorpu@linux01:[~] $ tar -zcvf Output_File.tar.gz SourceFile

ziptest/

ziptest/readme1.txt



--->>> Output_File.tar.gz    >>>   output file

--->>> SourceFile    >>>  source directory



atoorpu@linux01:[~] $ ls

oswbb733.tar                       patches                readme.txt  sys_checker.sh  ziptest.tar.gz

p19543113_851499_Linux-x86-64.zip  pitt_4_21_2014.dmp.gz  scripts     ziptest1



LIST CONTENTS OF TAR FILE:



atoorpu@linux01:[~] $ tar -ztvf ziptest.tar.gz

drwxrwxr-x atoorpu/atoorpu   0 2015-08-27 14:16:41 ziptest/

-r--r--r-- atoorpu/atoorpu  50 2015-08-27 14:14:20 ziptest/readme1.txt



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EXTRACT/UNTAR THE FILE USE :

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To extract one or more members from an archive, enter:

$ tar -zxvf {file.tar.gz}



If your tarball name is backup.tar.gz, enter the following at a shell prompt to extract files:

$ tar -zxvf backup.tar.gz



To extract resume.doc file from backup.tar.gz tarball, enter:

$ tar -zxvf backup.tar.gz resume.doc