Tar, Zip, and Rsync #1 Linux

A little history or TAR and Zip.  TAR, or tar, actually is a Tape ARchive program.  For those of you younger than 45 or so, we actually backed up our data on tape drives; serial and slow.  If you go back far enough, the tapes were reel-to-reel and we had to specify the tape length, starting point, compression (if any), etc.   When used with zip, TAR becomes a serial backup program with compression.  On today's computers and media, this process is many times faster than the old tape drives and is still very reliable.  Zip basically is a compression program that works well.  Most of us have used Zip in either Windows or Unix/Linux based backups. 

There are many websites with information on tar zip backups.  Used with ssh,
you can safely backup across networks, the internet, etc.  Bandwidth becomes the slowdown obstacle.  Personally, I use tar zip and ssh to make those daily backups of small databases and other stuff.  I use rsync for the really big stuff.
More on rsync next week.

OK.  For the actual command line using ssh, I do the following:

tar -cvzpf - /folder to backup/* | ssh jim@BackupStorageServer1 "cat > /destination folder/DestinationFileName.$1.tar.gz"

Read the man pages on tar and you will understand the -cvzpf.
I usually put the date in the $1 place.  
Practice extracting a file in a location on your computer that is not vital. 
That is all for now.  Next time: rsync. 
Have fun computing.
Jim