Linux Backup with TAR and Cron Jobs

[@dansfitnessvlog]

This guy is amazing. I learned a lot from Eli before I started my journey in the IT industry back in 2017. I have been jobless for about three years now, but I’m about to apply again for an IT staff position. Several companies require qualifications for a better understanding of Linux or more advanced knowledge. It took me about 4-5 hours to finish all of his 9 video tutorials to wakeup and refresh the learnings i had before. Even though the videos are old, they are still very effective. Thanks Eli! the best!

[@movie_nightmares]

Eli is the first source of information when I want to learn something new or just review things I have not worked with in a while. He is clear, easy to understand and the material he uses to show you something is easy to get.

[@SairatMatkal-r2t]

ELI IS TEACHER WHO CAN TEACH

[@gregjachtoma6490]

Einstein said that any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex. But it takes a touch of genius and lots of courage to move something in the opposite direction. Thank You for this tutorial

[@songsanams6355]

you are a star after this many years, no one has such a great description

[@GaryCameron780]

Watching in 2022. Eleven years later this is still very useful. thank you.

[@GrantTurnerMusic]

Great instruction. Just moved a website to a dedicated server and plan on using this to perform backups. Thanks dude!

[@mazdysoraya6121]

what a king you are! That is how things should be explained. I run into many tutorailas that skip points that make people confusing..Thank you

[@niaei]

Two questions: 1) How to exclude more than one path? Like: I don't want to keep /mnt and /media and /tmp 2) How to create a backup file for more than one path? Like: I want to create an archive file, and I want it to include /usr/share and /bin and /var/www. BWT sir, you're awesome. Keep do this. :)

[@oliverwyatt236]

tar -xvpzf your_backup.tar.gz --exclude={"/home/*/Downloads/","/home/*/Documents"}

[@SwingingInTheHood]

Here we are, some 10 years later, and THIS is still the best way I could find to back up my Linux systems (maintaining permissions and symlinks) to a NFS mounted NAS drive and AWS S3 bucket.

[@MrHav1k]

Eli you have by far the best tutorials on KZbin! I've learned so much from these linux videos and I love how you focus on what matters!

[@arasonsuresh1042]

Thank you so much for making Linux so simple to understand. You are the best teacher ever! I watched all the 9 videos from introduction to the end, every class was very easy to understand and I would be glad to watch all your classes. You just earned a subscriber.

[@hipman87]

I just went through your whole Linux course tonight, massively appreciated, very clearly presented.

[@telao492]

I wish I would have found you weeks ago! Thank you for explaining this down to the meaning of each character. Much appreciated!

[@stephenjasonwang]

Can't wait for tom to watch this so i'm watching it now... watched your whole Linux class straight and i loved it.. THANKS ALOT!

[@rimmiloud]

Excellent Teacher I have seen in my life Since I started the school on 1978

[@prabeshines]

wOw!!!!!! I never thought I would learn Linux this fast.... 2 Days and i know hell lot of things.... . THUMBS UP ELI !!!! U R AWESOME

[@elithecomputerguy]

You can backup / If you need a bare metal backup you can just use a piece of backup software.

[@sandhyasingh7356]

you made my life a lot easier with this video.....keep posting these kind of videos...you are too good in teaching eli

[@REDCAES]

Thx Eli you are the bomb!! I've watched about 35 of your videos so far and haven't been disappointed yet, thanks for making it easy to grasp!

[@yanxiang1987]

Thanks Eli for your patient and clear class. I learned a lot from you.

[@vsworld7757]

Best Video, your narration is too good to keep track of and your recap actually makes it hard to forget! Thank you soo much! Look forward for more videos :)

[@208dharma]

Thank you for your efforts to share your knowledge to everyone who wants. These are very helpful me.

[@Bubblegan]

Fantastic tutorial. I am so happy that I found your channel. Keep up the great work.

[@455rocks]

Sir,can you please do a video on Shell scripting(Bash and Perl)?

[@calingiurgiu2000]

God bless you Eli! Your videos are lifesavers! Thank you ! I wish I could replace my current teacher with you.

[@ernestoearlsalunat3785]

Awesome job Eli! I had so much fun and boosted my confidence. Cheers!

[@jimfurman3145]

Awesome I was searching for a linux backup program .... but this is so simple ... thanks!

[@iliketobathify]

Nano is an excellent editor for those finding Vim too difficult.

[@lvscan]

Excellent Video. Thanks for helping me understand Linux a little better!

[@serverguy276]

Eli, you are great, nice video and presentation. I enjoy watching all of your video.

[@kewlbeans9905]

Thank you kind brother. You are a gentleman and a scholar.

[@gmc9753]

Linux has a very helpful command called "file". This command can tell you what a file contains based on the contents of the file. It can tell you that a file is a compressed file, tar file, mp3 file, python file, etc. etc. So if you do create a compressed tar file called "Bob", you can identify it years later!

[@Rchauhan902]

thank you sir for your valuable videos. I learned lots of thing from basic to advance from your tutorials. thanks a lot

[@Waldi111979]

hi Eli, I have an idea for part two of this tutorial - I intend to do backup of my system, so that once it will get corrupt (after update/upgrade), I could go back to previous working Linux before corruption of the system. That's something I am missing in this tutorial. BTW - your tutorials are amazing! I've seen around 20 to date and they are so easy to understand! thank you for sharing with your knowledge with us publicly. cheers!

[@JamesSamples]

LOL, Dang it ELI!!! I watched this video trying to remember if its: ....--exclude=/mnt.... or ....--exclude = /mnt... with spaces Eli: "I'm not going to exclude anything, just to make life easier..." LOL that was funny

[@jeanettemartinez892]

Best video yet, you saved my brain thank you!

[@IvarsRuza]

There is lot more to tell about tar. t - option/switch/argument for me is the sugar when I use tar . Width a "t" option/switch/argument You can look inside tar archive :) Also its possible to extract one file after You had a look with a "t" option. About sudo - I belive Eli has configured sudo to be used without a password for certain non authoritative user to operate with system as a root. It's wrong - sudo loses the concept why it was made :) Also using sudo in cron - it's wrong for most of us, in case of Eli - as I said, I believe he has made one non authoritative user to be used without password. Also - sudo - it is not in all Linux flavours / distributions. Eli I would enchant this video course. But!!! Even for me it was great to listen - You are great orator. Good Job.

[@liketocode]

Love your videos - educational while entertaing :)

[@prashanthb6521]

This was so well explained. Thanks a lot ETCG.

[@srinivasachakradhar2442]

The way you presented Linux videos were really fantastic and it was very crystal clear.Can you share me the link if you have complete Linux Courses Videos....

[@DJ369-Miami]

You forgot to mention that you have to start the cron daemon with /etc/init.d/cron start

[@makondoo]

i did not start cron daemon with that and it works - Kubuntu 18.4

[@Axel-rs3cg]

appreciate your videos lessons and logical well expressed manner 👍

[@asandol]

Hi Eli ! Great videos ! just for you to know. There is a problem (at least for my view) on 11:17. It does not show you type the commands for the tar...only shows when it's finishing !. Best regards !

[@rafnaegels8913]

Adrian Sandol he does show the command afterwards.

[@Sawta]

I haven't researched these questions yet, so I'm sure that there's an answer out for this but it would have been nice if they had been covered in the video: 1) When running these scheduled cron jobs, is there a way for it to check to see if hardware is active and above a certain level first (say, CPU above 95% and the fans are going nuts), or if some specific program is already running, wait for that task to finish before proceeding with the backup? It sure would suck if you suddenly had cron trying to do a full / backup when you're running some extremely intensive program. 2) When a new cron job backup is run, will it overwrite the existing tarball in that directory, or does it automatically increment the tarball filenames in some fashion? I.e. backup.tar.gz1, backup.tar.gz2, etc. I'm assuming that it just overwrites the old file. Does anyone happen to know how you would get cron to avoid overwriting previously created backups? 3) This is really great tutorial for full backups, but how would you go about performing differential or incremental backups? My guess is that the answer is going to be "Just always do Full backups", but there have to be at least *some* cases out there where doing full backups, even with compression, simply wouldn't be acceptable (think 20TB backup when only a 1kb txt file has been modified).

[@soyargentino200]

1) yes you can. there are two ways of doing it. the first using ps aux | grep crontab. and the other is with top

[@BrianThomas]

Great video. Question. What if you wanted to transmit that backup off site to another Linux machine on a schedule? How would you do that?

[@FranseFrikandel]

Yes you can, everything you can do with the server can be done with the desktop using the terminal

[@fabriziodutto7508]

All very good! Except using wordpress :-) Thank you for sharing! Just wanna add that performing the tar -c.. command is NOT adding new nor updating old files inside the tar.gz file, every time it overwrite them, just take it into consideration! Also you can recover a single file from the tar, by using the --file option.

[@perolin3]

Eli thanks for all this videos Small problem on this: In the Lesson „Linux Backup with TAR und Cron Jobs“ something with the order oft the virtual sessions is messed up. The terminal sessions are starting in the middle and later from begin.

[@BrianThomas]

another thought I has as well to off site backups. What there were multiple off site storage area's? I have 3.

[@djsensacion7]

Thank you for the detailed explanations of it all.

[@patlab555]

Woow AWESOME course! You are taking time explaining every single thing, + you are speaking at a perfect pace for a non-native English speaker Thumb up + Subscribed Are the 19 who disliked your video, tried it on Windows?

[@umesh6254]

Sorry Eli, I know your video is good.. but in the video how did you get wwwbackup.tar.gz? Did you just go through vi and make that empty file or what? Whenever I enter the same command, it says it's not a file or directory or permission denied..

[@Kreosification]

It depends on what you want to compress. Video/Audio/Image files aren't really cut for compressing. Text-Files profit the most probably.

[@ciscomind626]

I like Your Channel So much You are the best teacher i ever had ! You are amazing Guy Too bad I can't join you in real Classroom With my laptop :) have a nice Day Greeting from Algeria

[@CaryInVictoria]

I've been enjoying these tutorials and find them very helpful. Three questions: 1. when extracting from a tar ball, why must you tell tar the file is compressed. Can't it figure that out itself? 2. If I want to schedule a cron job to be performed every Tuesday and Thursday would I enter "24" in the day-of-week location? 3.Suppose I want to schedule a backup once per day with cron, but I don't want the tar ball created today overwritten by the tar ball created tomorrow. I assume there's a way of avoiding that.

[@mr_gumball]

OMG, Thank you. This is the one of the most useful tut

[@shikhavyaghra8969]

Thanks for the video....I was struggling with this.This video helped me to solve my problem.

[@Kreosification]

Parameters can always be mixed for example ls doesn't care if you type "ls -RQ1" or "ls -1QR" :)

[@DavidJKoch]

Excellent tutorial series on Ubuntu Linux !

[@waristechtips]

Eli thanks for the informational video. quick question, when you did the crontab -e and it opened up crontab and had the # m h dom mon dow cheat-sheet, had you already input that into crobtab file for the sake of the video or did the earlier versions of Linux distributions already have that? I am using centos 7 and it doesnt have that little cheat-sheet. I know that its just a comment because of the # sign but i was just wondering. Thank you :)

[@lalitpnwr]

Eli you are a awesome teacher

[@satishkumar-to1ud]

Hello Eli Thanks for the sharing knowledge . I have a query , how can we restore the data to same directory where the data is missing instead of creating a recover directory and moving to it . thanks Satish

[@vdenim86]

whole day i had struggled and got this video thank u very much , please some video of apache and mysql thanks eli

[@01vally5]

dear when i take the backup..where is the backup path command?,thanks for your lesson

[@RC-Heli835]

Iv'e seen where folks recommend backing up / in Arch linux HD install from live cd being chrooted into the installed system. Is that what you do or does it only matter on Arch? Thanks for all your helpful videos!

[@eventhorizon1306]

Great series...Thank you Eli.

[@amabowilli]

Eli, I love your tutorials and how much you simplify them. Can you make a video on red hat or Centos kick-start? i mean the distribution doesn't matter if its a Linux kick start.

[@aplifiedchaos]

Many thanks buddy. You got yourself a subscriber

[@morningstars123]

thanks.. Happy to say u are my Linux teacher ..

[@baldeousmanedade4462]

Good morning, Mr. foremost of all I thank you for your excellent tutorials. So I want a proxy to block sites on Linux and if you have an idea I really need your help thank you

[@HB-ct8hh]

I don't have a server, just a laptop that I'm wanting a simple way to backup and restore. Can I use this lesson to backup my laptop or is there a better method for my laptop then this lesson dealing with servers? Thanks.

[@wubalm]

I like your lessons - very clear and simple. I am learning a lot from your lessons. I have one question. How can we backup to external hard drive from the command line. I am new to linux and I would appreciate if you teach us about this. Thanks.

[@raysaul]

Hi Eli I have a question for you, is there a way to backup an entire ubuntu system and restore it with this command or any other terminal like command? I am playing with a vm that is in a hypervisor which I do not have access to and I would like to have that vm backed up to a local machine (through ssh) and how will I go about restoring it? To my understanding, since I do not have access to the hypervisor I cannot use clonezilla or any other tool like that, I do not have access to the boot menu and such. So I am guessing (from what I am encounter) it is impossible to backup the vm, it is recommended to backup only certain files for example just the www folder instead of the whole system.

[@TRFAD]

ty this helped but for some reason the commands don't work with cron. I've added date codes so that it puts the date. The syntax works outside of cron but no in the cron tab. Not sure why. Instead I created a bash script and just had it handle it and then cron tabbed the bash script.

[@checkmusic2002]

how we can save every backup by date like 2-3-2017 8:30

[@andreymosienko6227]

Hi Eli. Thank you for really helpful course. Excellent presentation of the material.

[@isnadsultana3550]

Your video is so helpful and informative. Can post another video for how to automatically backup files for all users home directory using tar and shell scripting?

[@ldean97]

Hey Eli I have a question, im running linux mint 19 and I was wanting to add a custom desktop environment from the web, ive already got the file and its a .tar.gz but I cant figure out how to add it

[@cyohara4961]

Hi. Do you know what Linux OS (if any) that does not prevent you, from having the Home and Backup Library on your external drive. I have spent some time on Ubuntu trying to find out how this could work, without anything positive coming out of it?

[@Ravicgsce]

HI Eli I have a doubt. How do i schedule crontab to create file names dynamically so that my previous backups are not overwritten?

[@reddysekhar0072000]

tq eli, u r making my life easy

[@azyske]

hi, if I wanna exclude more than one folder? what should I type? "exclude=/video /audio" am I correct? thx

[@JAMESLINUXCOFFEE]

Eli I have been a huge fan of yours since my first computer back in 2001 and now in 2015 i am in need of a new computer within 6 months or less. What OS based computer would you recommend for running ecommerce apps? Windows or MAC?

[@JAMESLINUXCOFFEE]

***** or LINUX?

[@notapplicable2636]

Odd question from a Windows 10 user if you don't mind? (begrudgingly). I want to jump to Linux, and have tried to make a backup using Rsync of my old SSD, and am unsure on whether to use tar.gz instead in order to compress those files...? What do you think? Also is it possible to add a variable date and time to the filename somehow within the Tar command?

[@machst3m]

just realized that your description has the file .taz.gz in your extension. It won't affect the file at all, just something I realized.

[@KalishAlexander]

thanks a lot, your lessons are very informative and useful.

[@CaseySchneider]

What happens if you are trying to extract from a tar as a tarball by using 'z' in the command?

[@PratapKanhed]

Thanks for All lectures

[@chrisgast]

Can I cron a tarball to a storage server? What is the command to add the address and the port?

[@luisjesuscovarrubiasrodrig2108]

Excellent video!, but i have a doubt... What if i want to compress just the File that is inside a nested folders?, for example: /home/user/Music/File.txt I'll be glad if someone can help me with that.

[@TheAnigai]

But what about say for February 28th or 29th if applicable for a scehduled cronjob? If i want to run a backup on the 30th of every month would I be right in assuming that if the month does not have 30 days then it would revert to running the job on the closest day? How about bi-weekly backups? I assume that's also setting the day interval to 14 right? Awesome tutorial man, I love your videos.

[@blairmurphy2417]

Was that a fart at 26:29?

[@PerfectDarkSA]

+Blair Murphy Eli the fart guy :D

[@kounthavee1994]

hahahaha

[@OddBallTrails]

hahaha

[@qadeharpotter4013]

I think it was from his tommy not a fart,you know when you're pretty much starving

[@ChrisLCBoston]

Excellent video again!!

[@Waldi111979]

hi Eli, I watched the video again and you explain a bit how to backup parts or the whole system and how to recover tar ball file, but I was thinking about step-by-step backup of the whole sytem and especially detailed guide how to recover that system, so that it will not have to be re-installed, but just recovered from the tar ball file. for me it looks kind of rocket science, but you probably would say that all was explained already... . anyway, if I will find out somewhere on google.:)

[@bdf2718]

You were still doing backups with tar in 2011? Srsly? Sheesh, I stopped using tar for backups around 2000. That's when I learned that rsync existed. To another disk on the same server there's no advantage with rsync (but no disadvantage either). Rsync over ssh to a disk on another server and you get what is effectively a full backup but with data transfer amounting to less than an incremental backup. Rsync is designed to work well even with high-latency connections, so with the reduced data transfer daily full backups to remote sites is feasible. No faffing about backing stuff up onto removeable media and remembering to take it offsite. Plus you can have rsync automatically populate a directory with the files that changed or were deleted. So in one operation you can have a full backup and a decremental backup (like incremental but going back in time) with data transferred less than for an incremental backup. Or if you want you can have it create the equivalent of Microsoft's shadow volumes giving what appear to be full daily backups but with actual storage only of the unique files (don't forget to allocate some extra inodes to that disk when you create the filesystem) and data transfer amounting to less than an incremental backup. Tar was obsolete 16 years ago. You really ought to consider removing this video because it's giving people a *bad* solution to making backups. The only time tar is sensible is for archiving to tape, and archiving to tape isn't sensible when you can rsync to disk. So unless you're the NSA and keeping vast amounts of data forever, rsync is a far better solution.

[@kas1987kas]

Yes, much better than tar. I prefer Bacula. Also why backuping eg: /usr? You need only: packages list, /etc, /var (and /srv, /root, /home, etc).

[@bdf2718]

Nice troll. You prefer bacula. With four arcane components to configure, requiring a degree in rocket surgery to figure out. That goes horribly wrong if there is even minor clock skew. That can purge backups which later incremental backups depend on, rendering the incrementals useless and your recovery strategy fucked. That transfers an entire multi-gigabyte file if a single byte changes (tar has the same failing, rsync does not). Optimized for backup to tape, sucks big time for backup to disk. Plus many other lesser problems. Nice front-end, shame it's a bitch to configure and performs crappily. Yep, perfectly sane alternative to rsync, or even command-line tar. Marginally preferable to using pencil and paper to write down the pattern of 1s and 0s of the files, then restoring using a hex editor to type them back in. Oh, and the name means "penis bones" (something most mammals have, humans are one of the few exceptions). But it looks pretty, and that's what counts, eh? Oh, and it's always handy when you want to troll a discussion about sane backup strategies.

[@kas1987kas]

Bacula isn't hard to use or understand. You can also use BackupPC or Amanda or rsync or even back in time. Nobody force you. > Yes, much better than tar. I say it about rsync.

[@kas1987kas]

To clarify: > Bacula isn't hard to use or understand. I mean, if you sysadmin you may be forced to learn it. For desktop user is too much imho. Simpler is back in time or dejadup, etc.

[@dasanco1]

cron job abort 60 seconds after starting with 'exit code 141' ... thoughts?

[@ZXCY00]

Thanks, I used tar in the past for backups but couldn't do it right. All good now. Is it possible to encrypt the backups with tar?

[@suryakiransuravarapu]

Hi, i want to schedule a cron entry which run a videos at particular time, how can i do it. i tried below one but didn't work. i'm sure about timings and date but missing sometime else 28 20 31 * * cd /home/mr-surya/Downloads; DISPLAY=:0 vlc; /usr/bin/xdg-open Chilakamma.mp4 2>/tmp/errorra

[@JackDD]

Is there any reason to use tar over rsync for regular backups?

[@bdf2718]

Two reasons. 1) You need to archive to tape. I mean *really* need to. Not _want_ to because that's how you've always done it, but _need_ to because an rsync to disk won't cut it (because you're the NSA and archiving vast quantities of data forever so it has to be to tape). 2) You've never heard of rsync and therefore tar is the only backup tool you know of. That's it. Those are the only two reasons, and number 2 is dubious (but appears to be why this guy is using it). Rsync isn't just for backups. Two of the companies I've worked for used ftp (gah) to push tarballs to web servers then unpack them on the servers. And usually there were only minor changes to one or two files, but keeping track of what's changed and pushing only those files over is tedious and error-prone. But the tar-ftp-untar cycle is *slow*, especially if your company is out in the countryside with a shitty connection (pleasant working environment though). So, an hour (or two, on a bad day) to do the tar-ftp-untar thing compared to a few minutes with rsync. Because the connection was so shitty it wasn't just that the ftp part left the developer twiddling his/her thumbs for an hour, it made life difficult for everyone in the office for an hour. Those companies switched to rsync as soon as I demonstrated it to them. And it's also good for server migrations. Prior to me coming along and teaching them about rsync, a server migration required a code freeze whilst tarballs were packed, tarballs transferred from one server to another (usually data centre to data centre, so speed was good), tarballs unpacked, new server tested. Not forgetting the mysqldump on the old server and restore on the new. That usually meant a code freeze of 3 or 4 days on all the sites on the server. With rsync it was an hour of code freeze. Yeah, transfer the lot beforehand without a freeze, because that's a lot of data and takes a while. But then freeze and rsync to catch up on changes in an hour. The day I found rsync was the day I stopped using tar for backups. That was 16 years ago.

[@momgvisions6249]

Is there an advanced playlist? This one was perfect!