Full backups with BusyBox Tar

Full backups with BusyBox Tar.md

Full backup using Busybox tar

The version of tar supplied with Busybox has a slightly different syntax to the more familiar GNU tar. Let's look at how we can use BusyBox tar to do a full system backup.

tar cv -C / -X /tmp/exclude.list -f /tmp/backup.tar .

Let's break these options down

• cv
  Tar is running in create mode, with verbosity enabled
• -C /
  Change directory to / (locations will be relative to this)
• -X /tmp/exclude.list
  Read a file that contains a list of locations to exclude
• -f /tmp/backup.tar
  Create the tar file /tmp/backup.tar; use -f - for stdout
• .
  Add everything relative to the present working directory. Remember that the -C option changes the present working directory from the perspective of tar

Backup over SSH

This works as a pull operation. It creates a local tar archive containing a full backup of a remote server.

First, make sure that we have created /exclude.list on the server in question and have added the following to it

tmp
sys
proc
dev
run

Then we can run the command!

ssh root@remote "tar cv -C / -X /exclude.list -f- ." >~/backup_of_remote_server.tar