How can I gzip my web directories?

Question

I would like to make a compressed file of my web sites folder and send it to a backups folder, and I can't seem to find anything specific on google.

My web folder is : /home/user/public_html/mydomain.com/
Backups folder is: /home/user/backups/

Some Concerns

• Would there be any issues gziping while nginx/apache running?
• Also I have the permission set to 755, is this ok?
• Do I need to tarball before I gzip it?
• Will this overwrite a previous gzip?
• Is there a way to automatically append the date?...That would be great!

I have been manually doing this in Cyberduck ... what a pain!

Answer 1

1. It is always smart to stop anything that touches the files you want to backup. If files are changed during the creation of the backup you can not predict the outcome of restoring the backup: it might break data.

2. Yes.

3. No, but you will get seperate gzip'd files if you do not.

4. Yes if the names are the same.

5. Yes. A filename like backup_date '+%F_%T'.gz will have both date and time as part of your filename beginning with backup_.

Answer 2

tar.bz2 is a better compression tool imho.

tar -jcvf website.tar.bz2 /home/user/public_html/mydomain.com/