tar Syntax Help

[Drew Tomlinson]

On 7/7/2005 8:38 PM Matt Emmerton wrote:

>  
>
>>I'm trying to copy an entire file system while using an exclude file to
>>avoid copying things such as /dev, /proc, etc.  I've read the man page
>>and found the -X or --exclude-from tar option.  I've create a file
>>called /exclude.list.  It contains lines such as:
>>
>>/exclude.list
>>/dev
>>/proc
>>
>>But I can't figure out how to form the correct command line.  I
>>basically want to do this:
>>
>>tar -cvf - --exclude-from /exclude.list -C / . | tar xpf - -C .
>>
>>I've search the web and found examples that look similar to the above
>>but this does not work for me.  tar attempts to copy /dev and I get all
>>the associated errors.  I've tried other placements of either "-X", "X",
>>and "--exclude from" on the command line various things happen from it
>>just being ignored to tar thinking I want to create and archive named
>>"-X", etc., to tar trying to add a file named "-X", etc. to the current
>>archive.  I'm at a loss.
>>
>>I'm using 4.11 and trying to make a good backup before upgrading to
>>5.4.  Can anyone tell me the secret incantation to make this work?
>>    
>>
>
>-X only works with specific files, not entire directories.  You will need to
>list every file in /dev or /proc that you want to exclude, which is somewhat
>painful.
>
>The backup strategy that I've used on production systems is to back up each
>directory in a separate tar file.  Not only does this work quicker (since
>you can fire off multiple tar sessions in parallel), but you can avoid
>"special" directories like /dev and /proc, temporary mount points such as
>/cdrom and /mnt, and other directories that don't need to backed up, such as
>/tmp.  It's also quite handy when you've got large volumes of data (such as
>in /home) and the complete system image won't fit on a single tape.
>
>The general notion of my script is the following:
>
>#!/bin/sh
>for i in bin boot etc home modules root sbin usr var
>do
>  tar cvzf /backups/$i.`date +%Y%m%d`.tar.gz $i &
>done
>wait
>echo "Backups completed!"
>
Thanks for your reply.  I can do it this way and will for the sake of 
speed.  However this post suggests that one can use wildcards.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2004-July/052207.html

Have you ever tried that?  I did but was not successful.

Thanks,

Drew

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