May 2004
Beginner
368 pages
8h 44m
English
In Archiving and Compressing Files, you learned the basics of tar. As it turns out, you already know nearly all you need in order to do manual backups. If you want a comprehensive list of tar options, you can look at the (gigantic) GNU info documents. However, the good news is that you don't need to know very many options, and after reading this section, you should only need tar --help every now and then as a refresher.
With processors as fast as they are now, and disks getting ever larger, it doesn't make much sense to omit compression for any archive. Recall that you can create a compressed archive of a directory with one command:
tar zcvf archive directory
A large part of making a backup is ...