using tar on filesystem

aetengoku · 08-25-2003, 05:55 PM

Can "tar" be used on whole filesystems? If it can,
then how would i do it? i looked at the man pages but dont really
understand the syntax when using "tar -M" Anyhelp would be
appreciated and thank you in advance!

martinman · 08-25-2003, 06:09 PM

you mean like just tarring / ?

aetengoku · 08-25-2003, 06:12 PM

that is exactly what i mean! do i just have to
"tar -cvf / " or is it more complicated than that

trickykid · 08-25-2003, 06:18 PM

If you have the space, AFAIK you can tar your whole filesystem. If you select your / partition, that will thus backup everything since everything is under "/"

aetengoku · 08-25-2003, 06:22 PM

if i defined a couple of different file systems
like /, /usr, /var. all i would need to do is "tar -cvf /" and that
would back up all the file systems (/usr , /var and whatever else
i have) thanks in advance

trickykid · 08-25-2003, 06:37 PM

Yeah, say for example I have my html documents in /var/www and when I do a complete backup of my documents for my website, I can specify that directory, /var/www

aetengoku · 08-25-2003, 06:39 PM

thanks for the help

Azmeen · 08-25-2003, 10:00 PM

My preferred method is tar pcjf archive.tar.bz2 /

Preserves ownership flags as well as symlinks too