Linux 3

This week, you studied:

Creating and compressing backups with tar , gzip, and bzip2

Scheduling jobs with cron
Logging and log analysis

For homework, you'll expand on what you learned by researching additional features of tar and
cron. In particular, you'll learn about:

Incremental backups with tar

Extracting individual files with tar's --strip-components flag
Managing and backing up cron files

You will have to complete a series of readings, exercises, and questions. Please record your
solution commands and answers to the questions in a text file for submission. Use the
template in Submission.md.

Instructions

Tar
Stripping Components

By default, tar includes directory structures when you unpack archives. For example:

 $ tar -xvf TarDocs.tar "TarDocs/Movies"

 # Extracts `Tardocs/Movies`
 $ ls Tardocs
  Movies

If you just want to extract the Movies directory, and not TarDocs/Movies , you can use the --
strip-components flag.

Work through the exercises below to understand --strip-components .

Exercise 1
Run: tar --help | less . Search for --strip-components .

Read the article at: https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_section/tar_51.html

Read up until the line: The option --strip=2 instructs tar to...
Exercise 2

Use --strip-components to extract the Movies directory.

Use --strip-components to extract the Movies/ZOE_0004.mp4 file.

Modifying Archives

You will often find yourself needing to add, remove, or update files from an existing tarball.
You can do this with the following flags:

Add files with -r : tar rvf <existing archive> <new filename>

Update files with -u : tar uvf <existing archive> <updated file>
Update files with -d or --delete : tar -f <existing archive> --delete <file to
delete>

Note that the <updated file> and <file to delete> must exist in <existing archive> for
the above commands to work.

In these exercises, you will practice using these flags to update an existing tarball.

Open a terminal window on the Virtual Machine.

Change to the Projects directory.

Exercise 1

Copy sample.tar to update.tar

List the contents of update.tar .
Create two files: test1.txt and test2.txt .
Append them to update.tar .
List the contents of update.tar .
Exercise 2
Update update.tar with the latest copy of test2.txt .
List the contents of update.tar . Is the latest copy in the archive?
Exercise 3

Delete test1.txt from update.tar .

List the contents of update.tar .

Incremental Backups

You'll often use tar to back up the same directories on a regular basis—e.g., you might back up
/home every day at midnight.

We'll focus on two main backup strategies:

Full Backup: Create a new backup from scratch. This is what you've been doing with tar . In
this scenario, you'll back up every file in /home , every day. Full backups are safe, but slow,
and take up a lot of space.
Incremental Backups: Updates an existing backup with only the files that changed. For
example, if you back up /home on Sunday, and add a file called /home/new.file on
Monday, the next backup will only include /home/new.file . Since the other files didn't
change, they won't be backed up. Incremental backups are fast, and each incremental
backup is small.

A full backup is simply a tar archive. To restore it, you simply extract the archive.

Incremental backups are a little more complicated. You'll have one "base backup", such as
backup.tar . This is a full backup of the file system you want to save. This is also your starting
point. When you make incremental backups, tar will create small archives that only contain the
files that changed since you created backup.tar . So, you would end up with something like:
  $ ls -1 /var/backups
  base.tar
   # Contains files that changed from/weren't in `base.tar`
  incremental.1.tar

   # Contains files that changed from/weren't in `incremental.1.tar`

  incremental.2.tar

To restore from incremental backups, you need base.tar , and every incremental backup up to
the point of restoration.

A related skill is updating tar archives manually. This way, you can add/remove files to/from an
archive on an ad hoc basis.

For these exercises, you will create incremental backups with tar .

Exercise 1
Read more about incremental backups at: https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/ht
ml_node/Incremental-Dumps.html

What is a snapshot file?

What is a "backup level"? What is a "level 0" backup?
Exercise 2
Follow the steps below:

Create a level 0 backup of /home .

Add two files to your home directory with:

touch ~/new_file.1 ~/new_file.2

Use --list-incremental to create a level 1 backup. Call your snapshot file
/var/log/home.snar .

Copy /var/log/home.snar to /var/log/home.snar-1 . You need this copy to

create your level 1 backup.

List the contents of your level 1 backup, and read /var/log/home.snar . Do you
see what you expect?

Cron
Managing crontabs

It is best practice to keep backups of your cron table. This ensures that there is a backup in case
of accidental deletion.

To display and backup your crontab file, run:

 # Display crontab file

 $ crontab -l

 # Backup crontab file

 $ crontab -l > backup-cron-jobs.txt

You can remove a crontab file with the -i flag:

  # Removes your crontab file
 $ crontab -i

 # Prints: `no crontab for <"user">`

 $ crontab -l

To restore your cron table, run:

 # Restores your backup

 $ crontab backup-cron-jobs.txt

 # Prints the same cron table you starte with

 $ crontab -l

In the next exercise, you will practice writing commands using the cron simulator at https://cront
ab-generator.org to run on the Virtual Machine.

Using a simulator is a great way to validate existing cron statements or to create new ones. Using
a tool like this is a good habit to get into.

Part 1: Practice

Working in your home directory, launch the nano editor: nano cronsim.txt

Open a web browser on the Virtual Machine and navigate to https://crontab-generator.org.

Practice by creating three cron jobs:

Schedule the jobs using the Minutes, Hours, Days, Months and Weekday radio
buttons.
Enter a command in the Command to Execute field. Go for it! Enter any command
you've learned from previous activities.
Select Mute the Execution (Don't save or send output) radio button.
Select the Generate Crontab line button to see the statement.
View the output and copy each line into your text file.
Save the file and exit the editor.

Part 2: Schedule a job to run in your crontab file on the Virtual Machine.
First, return to your ~/Projects/TarDocs directory.

Copy the contents of ~/Projects/TarDocs/Documents into a

~/data/cron/Documents directory.
List the contents of the directory.

Now let's look at what the cron job will do. You'll use many of the commands from
previous activities.

The cron job should create a cronjob.tar tarball that contains ONLY the text files
in the ~/data/cron/Documents directory.

The job should then untar the tarball into a data/cron/exercises directory.

Suggestion: Try each part ( tar , untar ) of the command in a terminal window to make sure
they work.
Using the simulator schedule the job to run:

Tue, Thu and Sat - Note: some systems will not accept numbers. Please use the
names of the days.
 Every 2 minutes
The cron job is a single line.
Copy the generated line into your crontab file.

Part 3: Check the output from your Job

Check the data/cron directory for the cronjob.tar file.
Check the exercises folder for the extracted directory.

Part 4: Disable and Backup

Disable all the cron jobs from the lesson activities in your crontab.
Backup the file to backup-cron-jobs.txt .

Submission
Please fill out and submit the template in Submission.md.