Lets say you want to move your website from one server to another. One way you can attack this project is with tar. Tar will take a directory that you give it and put it into a single file and optionally compress it.
Creating a tarball
On the server that currently has your website you would want to run the following command. We are assuming that your website is stored in /var/www/html.
$ tar -zcvf website-backup.tar.gz /var/www/html/This will create a tarball in your current working directory named website-backup.tar.gz
Let’s break this command down so we can understand what going on.
- -z – This tells tar that we want to us gzip compression.
- -c – This tells tar we want to create a new archive.
- -v – This tell tar to tell us what it is doing.
- -f – This tells tar what what file we want created.
Extracting a tarball
After you move the tarball you created earlier to the new server you would want to run the following command to extract it.
$ tar -zxvf website-backup.tar.gzThis command is much like the last one we ran other than instead of a -c we used an -x. This tells tar to extract the archive instead of creating and archive.
After running this command we will end up with a folder in our current working directory named var if we were to follow the directory structure it would looks like var/www/html/. Now you can move the files you extracted into their new home with something like.
$ mv var/www/html/* /var/www/html/