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.gz

This 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/

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