[BBLISA] System Backup thoughts and questions...

[Brian O'Neill]

GNU tar will strip the leading '/' off by default, unless you use the -P 
or --absolute-names option.

However, I would always caution against using absolute paths unless you 
KNOW what its going to do, especially with tar since there are plenty of 
versions that don't have this safety feature.

I don't think I've used "cp -r" in many years. The tar method was 
preferable as it maintained permissions, times, etc.

I'm using rsync a lot more now, especially between systems over ssh.


Kathryn Smith wrote:
> I'm dating myself here. You could definitely do it to yourself on BSD, SunOS, and single digit Solaris versions. I haven't tried it on any Linux variants. Maybe they're more idiot-proof. :-)
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> This email address, aishabintjamil at yahoo.com, is my primary
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> 
> --- On Thu, 1/8/09, David Allan <dave at dpallan.com> wrote:
> 
>> From: David Allan <dave at dpallan.com>
>> Subject: Re: [BBLISA] System Backup thoughts and questions...
>> To: "Kathryn Smith" <aishabintjamil at yahoo.com>
>> Cc: bblisa at bblisa.org
>> Date: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 5:14 PM
>> Hmm...perhaps it doesn't work on all *nix variants, but
>> I actually tried 
>> that before I posted it (on Fedora 10), and it did what I
>> would expect, 
>> created /backup/directory/source/directory/<contents>
>>
>> I'll bear that in mind, though.
>>
>> Dave
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 8 Jan 2009, Kathryn Smith wrote:
>>
>>> --- On Thu, 1/8/09, David Allan
>> <dave at dpallan.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> tar cf - /source/directory | ( cd
>> /backup/directory ; tar
>>>> xvf - )
>>>>
>>> This is probabably obvious, but having shot myself in
>> the foot with it in the past, I can't let this go by
>> without pointing it out. If you try this approach, be
>> absolutely sure you use
>>> tar cf - ./source/directory
>>>
>>> The example here looks like you're using a full,
>> absolute path name starting at root for your source
>> directory. If you write that using a pipe, it goes right
>> back where it started, not to /backup/directory you've
>> just changed into.
>>> Been there, done it to myself, spent a very long
>> weekend recovering the file system.
>>> Kathryn
>>>
>>>
>> -----------------------------------------------------------
>>> This email address, aishabintjamil at yahoo.com, is my
>> primary
>>> email address. If you encounter difficulty with this
>> address,
>>> I can also be reached at aishabintjamil at speakeasy.net
>>>
>>>
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