On Mon, Jun 17, 2002 at 07:23:00PM -0700, Abner Gershon wrote: > This is very frustrating. I have 3 Linux books that I > have consulted as well as the man page and I can't > figure out how to use tar to back up my /home > directory from where it resides on /dev/hdd to my > other hard drive /dev/hdb7. > > I accidentaly ran fsck today without making the file > system read only which I later read was a no no and I > am wondering if this may have lead to a problem. I > never received any message that any of the files were > damaged though. > > Anyway I change to my home directory, "cd /home". Then > type "tar -cf /mnt/abner" (I previously mounted > /dev/hdb7 to /mnt) > > Then I get the error message,"tar: Cowardly refusing > to create and empty archive". I fooled around for a > couple of hours with different sources and > destinations for tar file but always got the same > error message. Aaarghhhhh!!!!!!!!!! > > By the way I am logged on as root if this helps. > > I desperately await your replies. Thanks.
Presuming you just want to create the tar file as abner.tar in the root directory of the /dev/hdb7 partition... tar -cf /mnt/abner.tar /home should do the job. If you want to compress the tar file to save space, add -z to the switches. Note that this will tar the directories and files as home/dir1, home/dir2/file1, and so on. If that's not quite what you want, then it can be tweaked a little bit. Of course, the above assumes that /dev/hdb7 is mounted at the time... - Chris -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
