[PLUG] tar usage question

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Sun Nov 1 22:58:02 UTC 2009


   I want to tar (to a mounted flash drive) the complete contents (dot files,
directories, and regular files) of my wife's ~/ on her laptop. When I use
'du -sh' on her ~/, I see that it consumes 1.5G of disk space. Yet when I
tar the same directory the tarball size is only 137M. I'm obviously missing
most of what's there.

   The syntax I used is 'tar czvf /media/disk/psa-home.tgz *'. I don't see
the dot files in the tarball, and I cannot immediately identify what's
missing.

   What might I be doing incorrectly? Is there a better way to backup her
home directory (and the /etc directory) to ensure every file is copied to
the removable flash drive?

TIA,

Rich



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