New Perspectives On Web Design

CHAPTER 8 How to Fix The Web: Obscure Back-End Techniques and Terminal Secrets

baCK uP anD ReSToRe

The tar and zip commands can be used to back up and restore. If your

website is missing, then restoring won’t help you much unless you have

previously backed up. So go back in time and back up your data with one of

the commands below. To go back a whole day:

$ gobackintime 86400

It is now Sat May 10 20:30:57 BST 2013

Just kidding — but it would be nice! The tar command stands for tape

archive and comes from the days when data was backed up on magnetic

tapes. To create an archive of a directory, pass the cfz options to tar which

will create a new archive in a file and then zip it in the gzip format.

$ tar cfz backupfile.tgz /var/www/vhosts/smashingmagazine.com/httpdocs

tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

All Mac and Linux computers support the tar command and most also

have zip. To do the same with zip:

$ zip -r backupfile.zip /directory/to/backup

To see what an archive contains, run:

tar tfz backupfile.tgz

var/www/vhosts/smashingmagazine.com/httpdocs/

var/www/vhosts/smashingmagazine.com/httpdocs/.htaccess...

Or for zip format:

unzip -l backupfile.zip

Archive: test.zip

Length Date Time Name

--------- ---------- ----- ----

0 2012-05-28 00:33 var/www/vhosts/smashingmagazine.com/httpdocs

234 2012-05-28 00:33 var/www/vhosts/smashingmagazine.com/httpdocs/.htaccess