I hope I haven´t done anything dumb

Discussion
21

Hi all, :wave:

thanks so much for your new replies. :heart:

@nevj:

Thanks a lot for that. Your example provides all the info I needed. :+1:
I was really longing to see a real-life example of tar being used.

I see. That makes sense of course.

This additional info is highly appreciated. I would have asked for it otherwise, because it´s an interesting point to me. :wink:

In contrast to that my clonezilla backup takes more than 2 and a half hours for

  • root partition: 13 GB
  • home partition: 29,6 GB
  • data partition: 134 GB

It has to be said though that a restorability check is included within this timeframe.

Well, that´s just great. I´ve never stumbled across ar so far. Never even knew it existed.
One never stops learning :wink:. Thanks for the hint.

Well, to be honest, the variety of potential command options and the posssible combination of them may very well seem daunting …
… for me as well of course.

So I reverted to using grsync which provides a GUI for rsync and it´s very intuitive to use.
Here´s an example for backing up my financial folder:

kgw_grsync
kgw_grsync1004×630 48.1 KB

If you need the exact command applied to a specific scenario set up this way, this command is provided in a subsequently opened new window.

Thanks again, Neville, for taking the time to provide such detailed info regarding tar. :heart:

@Akito:

Thanks for the hint.

Many greetings to all of you.
Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

2 Likes
22

Dont forget the distinction

  1. tar can only backup a mounted filesystem…so you should not use it for an active root filesystem. Same goes for rsync.
  2. Clonezilla requires unmounted filesystems, in fact it deals with partitions (or whole disks) not filesystems. So it is suitable for backing up system partitions

And an interesting point about ar
.deb files (You know, the files that download when you upgrade Debian) are ar files. You can unpack them with ar, and when you do that you find tar files inside the ar file.
It is possible to unpack a .deb file and install it by hand in a Linux that does not support .deb packages. It is a fair bit of work though.

And thank you very much for the insight on grsync. I want to look at that.

Cheers
Neville

1 Like
23

Hi Neville, :wave:

thanks so much for your latest post.

O.K., that I knew. Therefore the usage of clonezilla live (as a live-system). :wink:

In fact it came to me as a surprise to learn (quite a while ago) clonezilla was available as a package than can be installed on a regular system with:
sudo apt install clonezilla .

Of course it cannot be used for backing up the systerm partition of the system it is running on (as you pointed out).

You´re very welcome. :smiley:
I´m glad I could come up with something interesting.

Thanks also for your insights on ar.

As I was intrigued I looked at a .deb file I still had lying around: it´s greatlittleradioplayer_1.4.7_amd64.deb .

Man pages for ar say:

t 
Display a table listing the contents of archive
[...]
p
Print the specified members of the archive, to the standard output file. If the v modifier is specified,
show the member name before copying its contents to standard output.

So I tried it:

ar t greatlittleradioplayer_1.4.7_amd64.deb
debian-binary
control.tar.gz
data.tar.gz

That worked great. :+1:

But:
ar p greatlittleradioplayer_1.4.7_amd64.deb
produced just gibberish:

[...]
Ie>���1�#��:o�>rG�������]�>|�����+�z&�~OY���_|����s���s��}����+��G���k����է��w����?����ڧ?a��������?���M]��_N��|���.�▒��g�An�}��*�d������������ˑ_>������_2�+�T��e�0�I�▒���wj�=@3��G�|�6�W:� y��s��i"/���y"M����Kd8�A�nc�o���s�a���I��5'7��+�cUM�"�Y���W�
                                                                    ���,�%�_��&��'�Κ<OU▒U�g��Z�����M��w�n��}��Y������P&�=X �N^:QY/���:�g��O#��3� �Z�j��W�V
�W�E��:�'��bk��)]�p��m�▒Oݽ�>��So�C�w��m�������l��.��KˎK# CJx�#ן��I��ڳ��3���v�]��|���k�fמ���)���v�Gw��� ����Ll�}�q��C��v�b�����]��
                                  �m�1�%�p�����>}��ck_�����W��d[F_���8�z�Y�||�xR.s���ڵO�����B���J���
     |U�V��T��PHNM�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�$L�K%�?�W����⏎     

rosika@rosika-10159 ~/prov> [?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[2;1;1;112;112;1;0x[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[2;1;1;112;112;1;0x[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c

I guess this was to be expected as the contents of the .deb-file wouldn´t just consist of ASCII-text.

Curious though that at the end I not only got my prompt back but also this

[?1;2c[?1;2c[?1;2c[? [...]

Well, once again: I hope I haven´t done anything stupid … :question: :thinking: :blush:
At least I hope not as the command´s sole purpose was to print something to the terminal, right?

Many thanks again and many greetings.
Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

24

I am sorry … teaching you to suck eggs again. One of my faults

Yes, it is strange offering Clonezilla as an install … what would you do with it?

`ar p greatlittleradioplayer_1.4.7_amd64.deb`
produced just gibberish:

Yes, you printed binaries.
Try an extract
ar x filename
be careful where you are, it will write files
You can then unpack the tar files

Have fun
Neville

1 Like
25

Hi Neville, :wave:

No, no, dear Neville … no fault of yours whatsoever. I´m always glad to learn something new, or in this case get some affirmation of what I (hopefully) already knew. :blush:
So no need to apologize at all.

If anything it´s me who has to say sorry, because there may possibly be a few people out there who follow this discussion and don´t neccessarily know each and every basic fact…
Though often enough it´s me who´s in need of some lessons. :blush:

So thanks a lot for any additional info, Neville :heart: .

Hmm, I´ve never used the installed version so far.
But I guess except for the installed and running system you should be able to use it for backup purposes like backing up USB-sticks or other connected drives. :thinking:

Thanks for the clarification.
Indeed what I did was clearly wrong. Writing the binaries to the terminal doesn´t make any sense in the first place and it explains the mumbo jumbo output. :blush:

But other than that it couldn´t have done anything dangerous, right :question:
At least I imagine so. :thinking:

So I created a test folder and unpacked the tar file there ( ar x greatlittleradioplayer_1.4.7_amd64.deb)

ll
insgesamt 16M
-rw-r--r-- 1 rosika rosika 4,3K Apr  3 13:10 control.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 rosika rosika 7,7M Apr  3 13:10 data.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 rosika rosika    4 Apr  3 13:10 debian-binary
-rwxrw-rw- 1 rosika rosika 7,7M Nov  4  2017 greatlittleradioplayer_1.4.7_amd64.deb

It worked very well. :+1:

Thanks again for teaching me about ar.

Many greetings from Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like