question about backups

[Michael Wardle]

On Sun, 2005-10-09 at 17:52 -0400, Gregory Piñero wrote:
> These are all good ideas.  I'm personally using the tar method, but I
> can't figure out a good way to test that my tar file will actually
> work when the time comes ...

You can use the -C option to extract the file to a different location
(or just run tar from a different directory if the archive doesn't
contain absolute path names).

Say you were using

	$ tar -cf /tmp/home.tar $HOME

to back up your home directory.

You could extract the tarball using:

	$ mkdir /tmp/backtest
	$ tar -xf /tmp/home.tar -C /tmp/backtest
	
Then compare the two directories using something like:

	$ diff -aur $HOME /tmp/backtest

Obviously if you're using compression as well, you would add -z or -j to
tar's flags, or add your compression program in the pipeline.