I made several backups on different directories with Backup Manager. Eg: /home/user1 /home/user2…
It gives me some tar files. The content of a tar file looks like :
home/user1/ home/user1/.profile home/user1/.bash_history home/user1/.bash_logout ...
I tried to test the restoration with something like :
tar -xvzf home.user1.tar.gz -C home/user1
But the command above recreate all the structure inside the choosen directory. That gives /home/user1/home/user1/filname1.
So I guess I should use the command specifying the home directory (/home) instead of the user directory. But is there any risk to erase other user’s directories in /home ?
Thks for your time.
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Answer
Actually tar does not erase data as a default. But any files that are contained within the tar archive will overwrite files of the same name if they are already present. Likewise a sub-directory’s contents will not be overwritten if the tar archive does not contain files matching them.
mkdir -p foo/bar/ touch foo/file1 foo/bar/file1 tar -cf foo.tar foo/ rm -rf foo mkdir -p foo/bar/ touch foo/file2 foo/bar/file2 tar -xf foo.tar ls foo foo/bar/
As once can see both file1 and file2 are present and the newly unarchived directory did not overwrite the old. Here is the output of ls from my system:
foo: bar file1 file2 foo/bar/: file1 file2