One of our customers had a unique challenge of moving web servers. Their site was huge, with one directory having over 200GB of images. They opted to do a partial migration, copying over the website as is first before the final switch over.
The final switch over required to copy over only the latest files created or modified after a particular date.
The most efficient way would have been the rsync utility. Unfortunately, this was not an option as we did not have SSH access on the new service, so we had to find an alternate way.
The objective was simple;
- Find the files
- Archive/compress them
There are two commands that required to be run, the first one was to search for new or modified files after a particular date and the second one was to create a tar file.
The dry run command looked like so:
find /path/to/folder -type f -newermt '2017-04-01T00:00:00' -print0
Let’s break this down:
- find /path/to/folder
- This defines where to search
- -type f
- We’ll be looking for files only, recursively.
- -newermt ‘2017-04-01T00:00:00’
- The date from where we want to search from
- -print0
- This outputs the files so it can be piped into the tar command
For the second objective, we piped in the tar command to accept the output from the first. This would be appended to the original command.
- | tar -czvf /backup/archive-name.tar -T –
- Begin piping into the tar
- The tar will compress and output the progress (verbose)
- -T – takes in the files to archive from the previous output
Here is the final command:
find /path/to/folder -type f -newermt '2017-04-01T00:00:00' -print0 | tar -czvf /backup/archive-name.tar -T -
I hope this will be useful for anyone with a similar requirement.
