I have a question related to these utilities (pax, fcat, freeze)… Basically I’m a little confuse how to use them.
This is the issue, I have to backup the entire hard disk into a compressed file (i.e tar file).
Later I am going to put this single file into a remote server (already mounted using mount_nfs).
I have no idea how to compress the entire hard disk into a single file.
The hard disk does not have much files (about 50 Mb)
I really appreciate your comments or ideas how to do it.
Best regards,
Patrick
pax will take a bunch of files and put them together.
freeze will compress data ( much like zip under Windows). But freeze is old you’d better use gzip or bzip.
To backup an HD you would do something like:
pax -w / | gzip -9 >/mount_nfs/backupfile.tgz
You have to watch for not backing up the mount_fs file. Check doc on pax on how to exclude stuff .
What is happening is that pax will take what ever is under / and spit it out to stdout. It does this by adding delimiters around files to that is able to tell each file apart later. But since the output of pax is piped “|” into gzip, that means gzip will take the output of pax and compress it and put the result in the file backupfile.tgz.