Tar syntax

JTD · 10-28-2003, 02:54 PM

Hi,
I have read the manual but still cannot seem to get the syntax correct to do the following.
I want to backup /home using TAR and EXCLUDE all references to 'cache' or any web like cookies, history etc...
I can sucessfully run tar but my /home seems to bloat to ~2GB and thus cannot write to a CDR.
In that vain, how can I get TAR to split up this ~2GB file into 3 or 4 separate tar files while it is archiving it in the first. If I use SPLIT then I run out of disk space on my distribution drive.

Thanks in advance,

JTD

Tinkster · 10-28-2003, 03:14 PM

Tar, for all I know, will only allow multi-volume
backups to tape. You can look for star on
fresheat.net (it's from Schilling, the maker of
the cdr-tools).

As for the exclusion: you can't use wildcards,
if you need to exclude lots of stuff do something
like:

Code:

find /home/ -iname "*cache*" > /tmp/not_these.txt
find /home/ -iname "*other_stuff_I_don't_want*" >> /tmp/not_these.txt
tar -X /tmp/not_these.txt -cvzf /tmp/home.tar.gz /home

Cheers,
Tink

uteck · 10-28-2003, 04:28 PM

It might be easier to add the files you want to the tar file.
tar -czvf backup.tgz documents/ stuff/ more_stuff/ porn/ downloads/ windows/
for more compression use bzip2, tar -cjvf backup.tar.bz2 /stuff more_stuff/ ...