Creating Incremental Backups with Tar

So this is not brain science neither is it new. But if you are starting out in Linux you will need to know the basics. To that end we continue the series looking at tar. In this video we see how using gnu tar in Linux we can streamline the backups using incremental backups.
On Monday we can perform a full backup and on each day during the week we can backup just that days data from the command line using tars incremental backup feature.
Additionally you can find my video courses on Pluralsight: pluralsight.com/training/Autho... and take time to see my own site www.theurbanpenguin.com

[@userAndix]

Thanks a lot man! Finally got an explanation how tar really works. Maybe the Linux wiki could link to this because this Video made the topic a lot clearer to me.

[@leo-rq2ei]

Cool way of creating files ✌🏻

[@SlideRSB]

Great demonstration! I'm still a little confused. I would have thought that the delete instruction was in the snapshot file. That appears to not be the case. Am I correct in assuming that there's some metadata about files deleted in the actual tar file itself? Also, why is it necessary to give /dev/null as a snapshot when restoring? Why can't we just leave off the --listed-incremental argument?

[@markolinostyle]

Yhank you so much for this video, it has been very instructive. The only thing I still don't get (might be because English isn't my mother tonge) why you need to specify a snar file in the backing-up process whereas in the restoring one you don't. If it does take the info from the tar file. Why doesn't it just use the tar file to do the comparing in the whole process? I'm new in Linux.
Again thank you for your video.

[@tackle4826mc]

Thank you for clearly tutorial ;)

[@markolinostyle]

Hi: I finnlly got the answer for the questions I had, but I have another question. Is it possible to make a disk image incremental backup on Linux terminal?

[@nicolasst225]

Great video. Tanks for it. Why do you use --verbose twice?

[@gihanarambawela5637]

Thank you so much

[@turunacg]

Great, I'm using FIND with CTIME and exec TAR for incremental backup.

[@huyvole9724]

Your voice that's really nice. Can you post more and deep about tar backup/restore?

[@mranderson2492]

How to get progress bar e.g. "pv" for extraction/compessing in the case of incremental tar?

[@vrejab3795]

Thank you for the great video.
Only one question:
1. Can we use the '-z' flag for the incremental backups/extracts accordingly to have compressed files?

[@racingtheweb]

Hi, I tryed rsync for backup my data, but unfortunately it hangs on some files, so I can't use it because it just doesn't work properly. So I'm looking at tar, hoping this one could be the right backup system for me. I need incremental backups too, so I have to test your istructions in my pc. It would be great if I knew how to get a fully automated daily snapshots (just like you made in your video, but automated). By the way, very good tutorial, thank you.

[@ahmarsiddiqui]

a simple bash/node script will do the automated stuff which u can schedule via cron

[@racingtheweb]

I'll try it :-)

[@ahmarsiddiqui]

let me know how it goes or u need any help , writing automated stuff always makes me excited :)

[@racingtheweb]

Thank you very much, now I'm checking the new Urbanpenguin video in which he just explains how to make a script in order to get a fully automated backup. Take a look at it

[@DurgaswaroopPerla]

It would have been so much better if you had done "ls" intermediately to show the files being created.

[@MohdDanish-kv9sw]

tar: data.tuesday.tar: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
not working for me if i try to restore the backup

[@sportsxtreme587]

what about using "for" utility to append the data to multiple files instead of doing that on multiple commandlines.
# touch file{1..5}.txt
# for i in file{1..5}.txt
> do
> echo "this is a test file" >> $i
> echo "this is a test file" >> $i
> done