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BackupYourSystem/TAR

Introduction to tar Contents

This page is part of the BackupYourSystem 1. Introduction to tar

2. Preparing for Backup
article, as such, ensure you've read that
3. Backing Up
prior to continuing. This subpage will 1. Additional Tips
acquaint a user with the tar archival 2. Archive Splitting
program, a CLI solution to the creation of 3. Backup Over a Network
compressed archival backups. It will detail 1. Netcat
the creation and restoration of archives, 2. SSH
4. Restoring
including operation over a network.
1. Restoring GRUB
2. Restoring Over a
Before continuing users are encouraged to Network
read the TerminalHowto page which explains 5. Additional Resources
many basic concepts related to working with
a terminal.

Improper usage of any archival program can cause unintended data loss.
Read the entire tutorial before proceeding and understand what you are
doing.

Preparing for Backup

In preparation for a complete backup of the system, it is a good idea to
empty the trash and remove any unwanted files and programs from your
current installation. This includes the home folder which can be filled
with many files not needed. Doing so will reduce the size of the archive
created in relation to how much space is liberated.

A quick list of examples is below, decide for yourself what applies:

Delete all your emails.

Wipe your saved browser personal details and search history.

If you are not worried about the security concerns, this step is
not necessary. Many users explicitly want backups of their email
and browser settings.

Unmount any external drives and remove any optical media such as CDs or
DVDs that you do not want to include in the backup.
This will reduce the amount of exclusions you need to type later in
the process.

Go through the contents of your user folder in /home and delete all
unwanted files in the subdirectories, often people download files and
forget about them for instance.

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Backing Up
To get started, please open up a terminal, in Ubuntu this can be done by
Applications Menu -> Accessories -> Terminal. Some directories require root
or superuser permissions to read and write (needed for backup), for an
explanation on why see FilePermissions. To gain temporary root permission,
simply preface any command you want to issue with sudo, as explained in
RootSudo.

For this example, we will change directories to root. This is where the
backup will be made. This is an arbitrary decision, you should create the
backup elsewhere. For instance to a mounted external hard drive, another
partition or disk connected internally, even a folder in your home
directory could be used. In all cases, ensure the location your saving the
archive to has enough space. Simply use the cd command to navigate there.

cd /

The following is an exemplary command of how to archive your system.

tar -cvpzf backup.tar.gz --exclude=/backup.tar.gz --one-file-system /

To understand what is going on, we will dissect each part of the command.

tar - is the command that creates the archive. It is modified by each

letter immediately following, each is explained bellow.

c - create a new backup archive.

v - verbose mode, tar will print what it's doing to the screen.

p - preserves the permissions of the files put in the archive for

restoration later.

z - compress the backup file with 'gzip' to make it smaller.

f <filename> - specifies where to store the backup, backup.tar.gz

is the filename used in this example. It will be stored in the
current working directory, the one you set when you used the cd
command.

--exclude=/example/path - The options following this model instruct tar

what directories NOT to backup. We don't want to backup everything
since some directories aren't very useful to include. The first
exclusion rule directs tar not to back itself up, this is important to
avoid errors during the operation.

--one-file-system - Do not include files on a different filesystem. If

you want other filesystems, such as a /home partition, or external
media mounted in /media backed up, you either need to back them up
separately, or omit this flag. If you do omit this flag, you will need
to add several more --exclude= arguments to avoid filesystems you do
not want. These would be /proc, /sys, /mnt, /media, /run and /dev
directories in root. /proc and /sys are virtual filesystems that
provide windows into variables of the running kernel, so you do not
want to try and backup or restore them. /dev is a tmpfs whose contents
are created and deleted dynamically by udev, so you also do not want to
backup or restore it. Likewise, /run is a tmpfs that holds variables
about the running system that do not need backed up.

It is important to note that these exclusions are recursive. This means

that all folders located within the one excluded will be ignored as
well. In the example, excluding the /media folder excludes all mounted
drives and media there.

If there are certain partitions you wish to backup located in

/media, simply remove the exclusion and write a new one excluding

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the partitions you don't want backed up stored within it. For
example:

--exclude=/media/unwanted_partition

/ - After all options is the directory to backup. Since we want to

backup everything on the system we use / for the root directory. Like
exclusions, this recursively includes every folder below root not
listed in the exclusions or other options.

See tips before operation for additional information.

Once satisfied with the command, execute it and wait until it has
completed. The duration of the operation depends on the amount of files and
compression choses. Once completed, check the directory you set to find the
archive. In our example, backup.tar.gz would be located in the / directory
once completed. This archive can then be moved to any other directory for
long term storage.

Note: At the end of the process you might get a message along the lines of
'tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors' or something, but in most
cases you can just ignore that.

Additional Tips
To keep good records, you should include the date and a description of
backup in the filename.

Another option would be to use bzip2 to compress your backup instead of

gzip. Bzip2 provides a higher compression ratio at the expense of
speed. If compression is important to you, just substitute the z in the
command with j, and change the file name to .tar.bz2. The rest of this
guides examples use gzip, make the subsequent changes to the examples
before using them.

If you want to exclude all other mounts other than the current - by
this I mean partitions mounted to directories - then use the --one-
file-system option appended before the exclusion rules. This has the
effect of stopping tar from crossing into any other mounts in any
directory including /mnt or /media. For instance, many users create a
separate mount for /home to keep user folders separate from root,
adding this option to our original example would exclude home's
contents entirely.

Archive Splitting
If you want to burn the archive to discs, or transfer them to a filesystem
with a limited max filesize (say FAT32 with a limit of 4GB per file) then
you will have to split the file either during or after archive creation. A
simple means is to use the split command. Below are examples of both
scenarios. More information than conveyed here can be found in the man
pages of split, use man split in a terminal to read. Ensure you keep these
archives all together in a directory you label for extraction at a later
date. Once the archives are split to a desirable size, they can be burned
one at a time to disc.

To Split During Creation

tar -cvpz <put options here> / | split -d -b 3900m - /name/of/backup.tar.gz.

The first half until the pipe (|) is identical to our earlier example,
except for the omission of the f option. Without this, tar will output
the archive to standard output, this is then piped to the split
command.

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-d - This option means that the archive suffix will be numerical

instead of alphabetical, each split will be sequential starting with 01
and increasing with each new split file.

-b - This option designates the size to split at, in this example I've
made it 3900mB to fit into a FAT32 partition.

- - The hyphen is a placeholder for the input file (normally an actual

file already created) and directs split to use standard input.

/name/of/backup.tar.gz. Is the prefix that will be applied to all

generated split files. It should direct to the folder you want the
archives to end up. In our example, the first split archive will be in
the directory /name/of/ and be named backup.tar.gz.01 .

To Split After Creation

split -d -b 3900m /path/to/backup.tar.gz /name/of/backup.tar.gz.

Here instead of using standard input, we are simply splitting an

existing file designated by /path/to/backup.tar.gz .

To Reconstitute the Archive

Reconstructing the complete archive is easy, first cd into the directory
holding the split archives. Then simply use cat to write all the archives
into one and send over standard output to tar to extract to the specified
directory.
cat *tar.gz* | tar -xvpzf - -C /

The use of * as a wild card before and after tar.gz tells cat to start
with first matching file and add every other that matches, a process
known as catenation, how the command got its name.
Afterwards, it simply passes all that through standard output to tar to
be extracted into root in this example.

For a more complete explanation of restoration, see Restoring.

Backup Over a Network

The command tar does not include network support within itself, but when
used in conjunction with other programs this can be achieved. Two common
options are netcat (nc) and ssh.

Netcat
The command nc is designed to be a general purpose networking tool. It sets
up a simple connection between two networked machines. This connection
survives until the user manually disconnects it, unlike normal connections
such as tcp which terminate upon completion of a file.

Receiving Computer
On the receiving end you'll setup netcat to write the backup file as in the
following example. This command will setup a machine to receive standard
input from network to port 1024 then write it to the file backup.tar.gz.
The choice of port is entirely up to the user, as long as it is 1024 or
larger. A simple example:
nc -l 1024 > backup.tar.gz

Sending Computer
On the machine to be backed up, the tar command will be piped to nc which
will then send the backup over the network to the port in question to be
written in the file. Take note, where it says <receiving host> replace with
the name of the computer on the network. The f option was omitted since we
are not writing to a local file, but moving the archive through standard
output. The following is an example:

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tar -cvpz <all those other options like above> / | nc -q 0 <receiving host> 1024

If all goes well the backup will be piped through the network without
touching the file system being read.

SSH
You can also use SSH. For a complete explanation of its proper use see SSH.
The command below is an example of what is possible.
tar -cvpz <all those other options like above> / | ssh <backuphost> "( cat > ssh_backup.tar.gz )"

In the example:

The tar half of the command is the same as above, with the omission of
the f option to pipe the archive via standard output to ssh and onto
the networked computer.

ssh_backup.tar.gz Is the name of the file that will be created on the

machine indicated.

<backuphost> - Should be replaced with the name of the computer in

question on the network.

Restoring
You will want to restore from a Live CD. If needed, first partition and
format the drive. You can do this with gparted. Then simply mount the
partition you are going to restore somewhere. If you open the drive in
nautilus, it will be auto mounted somewhere under /media. Take a look to
find out where with:

ls /media

Restore Your Backup

sudo tar -xvpzf /path/to/backup.tar.gz -C /media/whatever --numeric-owner

A brief explanation:

x - Tells tar to extract the file designated by the f option

immediately after. In this case, the archive is /home/test
/backup.tar.gz

-C <directory> - This option tells tar to change to a specific

directory before extracting. In this example, we are restoring to the
root (/) directory.

--numeric-owner - This option tells tar to restore the numeric owners

of the files in the archive, rather than matching to any user names in
the environment you are restoring from. This is due to that the user
id:s in the system you want to restore don't necessarily match the
system you use to restore (eg a live CD).

This will overwrite every single file and directory on the designated
mount with the one in the archive. Any file created after the archive, will
have no equivalent stored in the archive and thus will remain untouched

Allow the restoration the time it needs to complete. Once extraction is

completed, you may need to recreate directories that were not included in
the original archive because you excluded them with --exclude. This does
not apply to filesystems excluded with --one-file-system. This can be done
with the following command:

mkdir /proc /sys /mnt /media

Once finished, reboot and everything should be restored to the state of

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your system when you made the backup.

Restoring GRUB
For the system to boot, you will need to restore grub. To do this, you will
need to reconfigure it in a chroot:
sudo -s
for f in dev dev/pts proc ; do mount --bind /$f /media/whatever/$f ; done
chroot /media/whatever
dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc

You will get a menu asking you what drive(s) grub should be installed on.
Choose whatever drive(s) the computer will be booting from.

For more information on repairing grub, see GrubHowto

Restoring Over a Network

This short guide, assumes you employed nc to make the original backup as
described above.

Receiving Computer
Ensure the disk has been mounted and use the following command to accept
input over the network that will then be extracted to the path indicated.
In this example, the directory /mnt/disk will be extracted to.
nc -l 1024 | sudo tar -xvpzf - -C /media/whatever

Sending Computer
On the computer with the archive to send, use the following command:
cat backup.tar.gz | nc -q 0 <receiving host> 1024

A few comments:

The - character in the first command will tell tar to accept input from
standard input rather than a file. In this case, input comes from the
pipe.

The backup file will be expanded without being saved on the disk of
receiving computer, the same as when the backup was made.

Additional Resources
"Backing Up Ubuntu"

"Wei’s world: HOWTO: backup my Ubuntu"

CategoryBackupRecovery CategoryCommandLine

BackupYourSystem/TAR (last edited 2013-03-10 04:01:25 by psusi @

142-196-87-46.res.bhn.net[142.196.87.46]:psusi)

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