[BBLISA] System Backup thoughts and questions...

[Arthur Gaer]

The Solaris 10 man page suggests:

        example% cd fromdir; tar cf - .| (cd todir; tar xfBp -)

Which has always worked for me under both Solaris 10 and previous  
incarnations.

On the other hand in Solaris "cp -pr" also does the right thing for  
me, perserving ownership, permissions, last mod date, etc, even cping  
entire multi-GB file systems.

In the distant past, I believe the -p option didn't work properly in  
SunOS across NFS (or was that Ultrix?).  Seems to be ok now, though.

Arthur Gaer
gaer at math.harvard.edu

Senior Systems Manager, Department of Mathematics
Harvard University, 617-495-1610, FAX: 617-495-5132


On Jan 8, 2009, at 5:41 PM, Brian O'Neill wrote:

> 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
>> email address. If you encounter difficulty with this address,
>> I can also be reached at aishabintjamil at speakeasy.net
>> --- 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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