tar restore went bad

[aitken-BwLjziHGQLusTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org]

I am trying to implement a backup plan for my network.

I finally got ftp to move the .gz.tar from machine to machine. But
when I tried to restore to see if it would work, I ran into problems
with tar.

I have read and reread man tar - it's not that long.

The problem I'm having is the account that I "restored" the home
directory for is
pooched. I can't log into the account. I tried gong in as root and
changing the
password, recreating the account, recreating the group. Finally
I created a new
account to go in as. I know that the ns mail file is OK - I pointed my
new account
to it and it is working OK. But the GUI login doesn;t work.

I guess I got confused when I was trying to be clever and point the
archive to
be created somewhere other than the home dir of the account.

    tar -czvf /locbudrv/hons800bckup.gz.tar /home/chris

Would it have been safer to just use ...

    tar -czvf hons800bckup.gz.tar /home/chris

from where I was (/home/chris)?...

then copy that to wherever, like /locbudrv  (which is hdb2, if that
matters),
and to a floppy for off-site storage, etc.?

So, I'm assuming the first problem is that I got confused where I was
when
I created the tarball and where I was when I extracted it...

The second problem may be that some of the files would not overwrite
when I did the restore - which may be part of a bigger problem: I don't
know how to safely test the restore procedure. Ironic, because the point
of
all this is not to lose functionality of my  /home/chris, which is
exactly what
happened when I went to test the restore.

So, I ended up with chris folders within home folders, home folders
within
chris folders and even, at one point, a home within a home. Obviously
I did
sone thrashing about before I calmed down.

: /

Chris



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