Tar Backup of Webserver on FC10

[newhelpeeps]

I want to backup my apache website using tar. I want to make sure all the permissions and such stay the same so that if I restore a website, it's ready to go exactly as it had been.

I am using the following command and would like to know if there is anything else I should neeed to do?

tar --xattrs cvzf backup.tgz /path-to-webserver-files


Now my other question is since tar doesn't store absolute paths, when I run the restore I have to be in the root directory? In another words if I run the command in a user directory will tar do something retarded like encode the paths as ../path-to-webserver or will it just be path-to-webserver so that when I run the restore from the / folder it will automatically go into the right place?

Thanks!

[neogranas]

I'd recommend going to the directory that contains the folder(s) for the files you want. As an example, my websites are in /home/user/public_html/

So I change to /home/user/ then run the tar command on public_html so that it grabs all my websites, then to restore it I just go to the /home/user/ folder and unpack it. The basic idea I'm trying to get to is whatever directory you start your tar in, make sure you can untar in the same folder.

[newhelpeeps]

OK so I figured out the tar storage format, no matter what dir I create the archive in it just removed the first "/" so like if I do a tar file of "/var/log" it saves as "var/log" which is very good. Now my question is I am backing up all of the attributes and crap. I made a script that saves my config files and data. I think I can just reinstall fedora and untar in the root dir to fix. See any issues I need to be aware of? Here's the script I manually will run every now and again

#!/bin/bash
tar --xattrs -cpvzf backup.tgz /var/www/html
tar --xattrs -cpvzf backupconfig.tgz /etc
mysqldump -u root -p --all-databases > mysql.sql

[stevea]

You don't need to cd to the directory, just use the "-C dir" option. This also works on extract.

If you ever want the leading "/" then use the "-P" option.

Yes the --xattrs captures selinux context and acls (if these exist) and -p implies the basic perms.

Just a thought ... you may want to consider a differnet compression
tar --use-compress-program=lzop --xattrs -cpvzf backup.tar.lzo /var/www/html
lzop is not quite as good at compression as gzip, but is much faster.

[newhelpeeps]

Good to know, have to say gzip did compress 130megs down to 16! I think it was mostly text data and pictures it didnt make much of a difference on... not sure I'd want it trying to do much with my pictures anyway!