I backed my home directory as I will make this a habit to do every Friday. I have lots of data I can't lose so I made a "tarball" of my only shell users home directory.

I ran the following command...

It created a nice 16GB tarball and then I ran the following command...

Now I own the backup file of my home directory but it still shows its under roots group ownership. Can anyone please tell me what else I need to do so I don't have any permission issues if I ever need to un-tar this on a different or same machine? Can "carlos" un-tar this tarball w/o any problems or do I need to be root?

Use the chgrp command for the group part.

Brian1

You can also use chown to accomplish that in one step. For example, if the user carlos was in the users group:
If you leave the file under /root you'll still need to be root to untar it because the user carlos won't have rights to the /root directory. Once you move it to another directory you will be able to untar it.

You shouldn't be backing up your home directory as root anyway.

Since you're going to be doing this regularly, as you should, it might be preferable to use a tool that can do incremental backups (dar for example), and maybe do a full backup once a month or so.

OK - so you're suggesting that I do back up my home dir as the owned user for that particular /home dir.

My next question is how complicated is "dar"? Are there any other options as well ? I just don't want to pick a super complex back up utility and become frustrated.

Configuring dar is slightly more involved than a simple 'tar ...' and works slightly differently, but it is fairly straightforward once you've read the docs carefully.

There are loads of other backup utilities, there is a list here http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Backup/.

Also, have a look at http://www.linux-backup.net/App/.