How do i tar a folder?

[HH-Steven]

Hi all

Ok, so recently i had a hard drive failure, datacenter (layeredtech) were very quick to help out on this and they did an OS reload with a new drive and the old drive as slave.

Most accounts were restored fine but now its come to the time when ive restored as much as i can and i am ready to tell the DC they can remove the slaved drive and do with it as they wish.

What i want to do (in case of any requests for old data) is make a tar file of the /backups/ directory and also the /var/lib/mysql/ directory and download these to my local pc.

The corresponding paths are:

Slave drive is mounted as: /home/backup/

Tar and download: /home/backup/backups/cpbackup/weekly/ (and monthly)

Tar and download: /home/backup/var/lib/mysql/

I plan on moving the tar files to a personal account of mine so i can then download them via the browser which i know how to do so i just need to know how to tar these folders up correctly.

Any help is greatly appreciated, cheers.

[chirpy]

This will create a tarball in whatever your current directory is:

tar -czf mysql.tar.gz /home/backup/var/lib/mysql

etc.

[chirpy]

Yes, that'd do it.

I'd suggest two things:

1. Make sure you've got unlimited quota on that account so you don't blow it

2. Use FTP instead of downloading through your browser which would be a much greater hit on your server and less reliable than FTP

[HH-Steven]

Right so im assuming that all i need to do is say:

cd to the account i want to download them from say:

cd /home/********/public_html/tardownload/

then:

tar -czf mysql.tar.gz /home/backup/var/lib/mysql

tar -czf weekly.tar.gz /home/backup/backups/cpbackup/weekly

tar -czf monthly.tar.gz /home/backup/backups/cpbackup/monthly

Then these archives would be available from:

domain.com/tardownload/

?

[HH-Steven]

Strange how it put your reply above mine..........oh well

Seems like i under estimated the size on some of these archives, god bless my 16 meg connection

but.....thats exactly what i wanted chirpy, i was originally thinking of downloading them all via winscp but im sure you can imagine how long that would take.

Cheers.

[mohsen2]

How do i tar a folder without shell access?

I'm looking for a PHP script tar a folder. Is there any other solution?