How to zip files and folders for backup in Linux

You might need to zip a number of files, folders and sub folders to keep as a backup .

To zip the folders and subfolders:

tar -cvzf mytarfile.tar.gz mydir/

This will create a new gzip file of your entire folder mydir/ no matter how many files or sub folders in that

To untar a gzip file :

 tar -xf mytarfile.tar.gz

So you might get an error if you give the full path for the files/folders with tar. This actually a feature, not a problem. But this might cause problems when running tar from a script .

tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

You can use the –absolute-names or -P with your tar

tar -cvzf bkup.tar.gz --absolute-names /home/ubuntu/

tar -cvzfp bkup.tar.gz /home/ubuntu/

But this results in an archive that extracts in complete paths . So if you don’t need leading slashes in a tar archive , you can also use -C / option :

tar -cvzf bkup.tar.gz -C / /home/ubuntu/