Why /home folder is missing from my backup archive created by tar?

Posted by Konstantin Pereyaslov on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Konstantin Pereyaslov
Published on 2012-06-04T07:55:38Z Indexed on 2012/09/06 9:41 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

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unix

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backup

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tar

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vps

So I'm doing full backup of my VPS using the following command (as root, of course):

tar czvf 20120604.tar.gz /

Everything seems to be fine, all files seem to appear in the list. The size of archive is 6 Gb and gunzipped version is 11 Gb which includes /home, because I totally have 11 Gb of data on VPS. But when I try actually to unpack archive, or open it using mc or WinRAR, there's no /home folder. And WinRAR tells 20120604.tar.gz - TAR+GZIP archive, unpacked size 894 841 346 bytes. It can't be WinRAR's bug, because when I type tar xzvf 20120604.tar.gz, /home folder isn't unpacked either.

Why is /home folder missing from my archive? And what can I do to include it there?

tar --version outputs the following: tar (GNU tar) 1.15.1

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