I am trying to make a backup of my site using the tar command. Below is an example of the command that I enter and the results that I receive. The problem is that the tar begins to get built and then after about 15 minutes it disappears.

Can someone tell me what I need to do to get this to work properly?

root@server [~]# tar czf /home/temp/public_html/backup/files/test.tar.gz --exclude=backup /home/temp/public_html

tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

tar: /home/temp/public_html/axs/log.txt: file changed as we read it

tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Hi,

Does test.tar.gz actually exists and is not null afterwards?

Unless you explicitly tell tar to use absolute names (-P option), tar will always strip the leading / and tell you that it did. Think before using this option.......

During the time tar ran one of the files changed. Depending on which file it is you can/cannot ignore this.

Tells you that tar ran with errors (which are shown before this message).

The above explains the first question. If you do have a tar file (test.tar.gz) after all the above, you have a backup that's ok. You can check the contents of this file with tar tzf filename (but you migth already now that).

If you do not end up with a tar file: Any other message (command line and/or logs)?

Hope this helps.

test.tar.gz does not exist after the process completes. I can watch the file create and grow in size. At a point that is never exactly the same, the file disappears.

I was able to elimnate all the other error messages that you address above but the file still does not complete and I get no error messages when I run it from the command line.

Hi,

Without any other messages it's kinda hard to find the cause. You can run the command with the v option included (tar vczf ....).

Although I do expect an error if it happens, is your tar file very big?

I'll try that. I don't know what you would consider big but website it is trying to backup is about 7GB in size.

That is big.

Have had lots of 2G+ problems using unix, haven't had to tar 7G on a linux box yet so don't know if this can pose a problem. I also read somewhere that GNU tar keeps running with files bigger then 2G, but I don't know how much more it can handle.

[edit]
Try feeding tar chuncks that are 2G, see if it works and keep increasing. I will tell you if the size is a problem.
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