shrinking backup files

[Sebastian M=?ISO-8859-1?B?/A==?=sch]

Hi,

Once upon a time Charles Malespin wrote:

> 
>>> 
>>>  tar czvf /path/to/file tar-archive.tar.gz
> 
> Tried this: 
> sudo tar cjvf /home/malespin/backup/home.tar tar-archive.tar.bz2

As "man tar" should tell you ... The Syntax is

tar cjvf output-archive inputfiles ...

params:
    c   create archive from files
    j   compress with bzip2
    v   be verbose
    f   write archive to file

But this is just for creating a new archive!

If you already have an uncompressed tar archive use
bzip2 file.tar
Or
gzip file.tar
to compress it, otherwise you'll get a compressed tar-archive containing
another uncompressed archive, which makes no sense. After these commands
their's a new file within the directory, depending on the used
commpression-tool .gz or .bz2.

To split up the archives if they are to big, you may split files

For example to split up a file into chunks of 600 MB, you'll use do the
following ... You'll use the magic of pipes.

To create a compressed tar archive splitted into chunks of 600 MB ...

tar cjf - source | split -b 600m archive.tar.gz_

Replace "source" with the directory or file.

Which will result in files archive.tar.gz_part_aa archive.tar.gz_part_ab
archive.tar.gz_part_ac ... Just burn each of them on cd.

To reasamble and extract the archive, first copy all parts to your disk and
run the command ...

cat archive.tar.gz_part_* | tar xjvf - dest

Replace "dest" with the location where you want to extract the files.


Cu
Sebastian




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