Hi,

I have a cron that makes a tar.gz backup of my sites and stores it on my server's 2nd hard drive. I would like to be able to FTP it to my PC and then make DVD backups. I have tried to open and extract files from the tar.gz files, but have not had any luck yet. With PowerArchive and PKzip, I can see the files when I "OPEN" the archive, but when I try to "EXTRACT" any files, nothing happens. Any ideas? This is driving me nuts.
thanks!!

Hi Stuka,

I would assume you're trying to open that tarball in windows? I would recommend using winrar or cygwin (which should have a tar utility). Another alternative would be to package them on your server using zip (or another format windows can handle natively) prior to sending them to your PC.

hi mmyers, thanks for the quick reply. Yes, I am trying to extract files under WinXP on my PC. When I use WinRAR, I get a slew of error messages: http://www.subsim.com/1_1_acondition.htm

I'm guessing the cron job is designed to save the sites as tar.gz because it is easier to restore the server that way? But consequently, the tarball is not Windows friendly?

Hi Stuka,

Thanks for the link, I think I see your problem exactly now. It looks like the tarball you have contains symbolic links. Windows may not be able to handle these files correctly, but it looks like winrar is throwing messages and continuing anyway. At least, I can see in the background that you have a /bin, /boot/, and /etc/ unpackaged. The inability to handle the symlinks really shouldn't prevent tarballs from extracting, the files should just be ignored altogether. Chances are, the files in /bin are not critical to your websites, so you can probably try creating the tarball and excluding that directory.