Backup Script Problem

[niels]

Hey everybody,

I'm writing a script to automaticaly backup a directory with the tar command.

Now I tried several different approaches to use relative paths but I can't get it working. I always get the following error : tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

I tried the tar -cjfP $TAR_FILE $DATA, or tar -cjfP $TAR_FILE -C /$DATA and my last approach is creating a textfile with each file name to add to the tar file, like this :

# --- BEGIN ---
DATA="/CVS_Repository/ErikStevensBackUp"
DATA_LIST="/Backups/backup_list.txt"
TAR_FILE="/Backups/ErikStevensBackup-`date +"%d-%m-%Y"`.tar.bz2"


# first remove old backup
rm -f /Backups/ErikStevensBackup*.*.*

# Create dataList
find $DATA -depth -print > $DATA_LIST

# create backup with date
tar -cjfTP $TARFILE  $DATA_LIST

# Remove old data list file
rm -f $DATA_LIST

# --- END ---

Anybody has a answers for my problem ? I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 Server edtion.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Regards,

Niels

[Jason Cooper]

Now I tried several different approaches to use relative paths but I can't get it working. I always get the following error : tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

Don't worry about the error, tar is just telling you that it is removing the / from the start of the files. So if you have asked tar to store /etc/ it will store the files in the tar as

etc/passwd

etc/shadow

...

This is a good thing or you make it very easy to overwrite things accidentally when extracting the tar file.

If you really want to store the / at the start of the filename then use either -P or --absolute-names, but I don't think you will want to do that.

If you really want to get rid of the error but keep the relativity of the filenames then try something like

# --- BEGIN ---
DATA="CVS_Repository/ErikStevensBackUp"
TAR_FILE="Backups/ErikStevensBackup-`date +"%d-%m-%Y"`.tar.bz2"

# first remove old backup
rm -f /Backups/ErikStevensBackup*.*.*

# Change to the root directory so we can reach all the files we need relatively. (man pushd and popd for more info)
pushd /

# create backup with date
tar -cjfTP $TARFILE  $DATA

# Pop us back to where we were
popd 
# --- END ---