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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