Archives

Archives

Archives support:

• Files
• Directories

Examples

The following examples should be placed in your Backup configuration file.

Backup::Model.new(:my_backup, 'My Backup') do
  # examples go here...
end

Files and Folders

The following creates a single .tar file called my_archive.tar

archive :my_archive do |archive|
  # add a file
  archive.add '/path/to/a/file.rb'
  # add a folder (including sub-folders)
  archive.add '/path/to/a/folder/'
  # exclude a file
  archive.exclude '/path/to/a/excluded_file.rb'
  # exclude a folder (including sub-folders)
  archive.exclude '/path/to/a/excluded_folder/'
end

• You can archive as many files and folders as you like within the archive block
• You can have as many archive blocks as you like within your configuration file

The archive above would be saved as archives/my_archive.tar. If a Compressor has been added to the backup, then the output of the tar command will be piped through the selected compressor. So, if Gzip is the compressor, the output would be archives/my_archive.tar.gz.

When using archive.add to add files or folders, if the given path does not exist, a warning will be logged and the path will be omitted from the generated tar command. This is to prevent a backup from failing should a file or folder not exist.

If you need to backup files or folder that may not exist at the time the backup is run, you should check for their existance before adding them to avoid the warnings, like so:

archive :my_archive do |archive|
  # add files
  ['path/to/file.rb',
   'path/to/file.txt'
  ].each {|file| archive.add(file) if File.exist?(file) }

  # add folders (including sub-folders)
  ['/path/to/folder_a', 'path/to/folder_b'].each do |folder|
    archive.add(folder) if File.exist?(folder)
  end
end

Additional Tar Options

Archives also have a tar_options method, which can be used to add additional options to the tar command used to create the archive.

For example, to have tar follow symlinks and store extended attributes, you could use:

archive :my_archive do |archive|
  archive.add '/path/to/a/file.rb'
  archive.tar_options '-h --xattrs'
end

The options available for tar will depend on your system. See tar --help or man tar for details.

Note: Do not add compression flags using tar_options. To compress your archives, add a Compressor.