Why homedir.tar inside a tar.gz file?

[Silent Ninja]

I've been trying to restore a folder from a compressed backup, and noticed that you tar the contents of homedir, just to compress it afterwards with a new tar.gz

This forces me to decompress the whole homedir.tar file, to then restore a file from it. If the files were directly available on the homedir folder of the tar.gz backup, I will be able to restore a file or a folder without decompressing it entirely.

It might be useful for incremental backups (without compression) but it's annoying for compressed backups when you don't want to restore it completely.

This should be optional.

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello

cPanel version 11.38 introduces some optimizations to the existing backup system. The homedir.tar file is no longer included in the archive. Instead, the home directory is packaged the same way the other directories are packaged. cPanel 11.38 is currently only available in the "Edge" build tier, so it's not yet suitable for production servers. You can find the release notes at:

cPanel 11.38 Release Notes

Thank you.

 

[Silent Ninja]

That's great, just what I was looking for :D !

Thanks, Michael

 

[cPanelKenneth]

Packaging the home directory as homedir.tar was done primarily for performance reasons. Rather than copy hundreds, or thousands, of files, streaming them into a single file reduces the I/O.

As Michael commented, we changed how the home directory is stored in 11.38. It is still done in a method that reduces the I/O, hence similar to the benefit of streaming to a file, but now appears directly in the homedir directory within the cpmove archive.