unpacking .tgz files from a Linux server?

buglawton

A bit of a long shot I know.... My hosting co allows me to export the entire hosted content via an export onto my computer, it is of the format zip.tgz

All well and good, however I need to be confident that this is actually a useful backup or there is no point in having it. Normally I would unpack it and have a look at what files are within.

All the progs I have tried fail to unpack it onto an XP machine e.g WinRar, Peazip, etc.
Any suggestions?

spud17

Just had a quick Google, it also says use Winrar,Winzip etc.
One hit did say that Windows sometimes mistakenly altered the extension from .tgz to .tar, so check that .
http://www.omnetpp.org/pmwiki/index.php?n=Main.UnpackingTarballs

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/How_to_unpack_a_tar_file_in_windows

fwor

7-Zip should handle it:

http://www.7-zip.org/

As Spud suggests, Linux doesn't care what the file extension is (it uses magic numbers instead to work out file format) so transferring stuff from Linux to Win can cause some confusion if the originator doesn't pay attention to using the correct extension for Windows.

spud17

7-Zip should handle it:

Should have highlighted it in my second link, :mad: :cool:

buglawton

Yes I've also be Googling and got 1 step further by finding that the file can be decompressed after the 1st byte of the file has been deleted. This reveals a file called "dummy". It's size implies it contains all the site contents but all I can do with it is view a list of all files and their locations on the original server. Any attempt to actually inspect them by doing a 2nd pass extract fails.

My hosting co has now informed me that this file is not meant to be unpacked, it is purely for restoring in case of data loss. Pity as I need a reliable way of backing up AND inspecting the contents and looking at individual files so I can be confident that a restore could be done to a different host if needed one day.

LardyCake

http://peazip.sourceforge.net/tar-windows-utility.html

buglawton

Yep, tried Peazip too. The answer is out there.... somewhere...

Lorian

tgz will be a Gnu Zip of a tar file.

To extract will be a 2 stage process

You should be able to
1. gunzip it to get a file (maye 7zip etc will do this)
2. tar -xvf <file> to extract the directory structure.

gunzip will be free to download from the gnu site, and tar is freely available (cygwin for instance)

PROLIANT

What flavour of Linux server are you using? Debian type O/S lik UBUNTU or SME Server? If you are using any of the latter you can use the APT install command from BASH shell.

buglawton

I've been told already that the file is really only for 'restoring' to another Linux server. However, because it's business-critical stuff, I want to open & inspect the archive contents with a view to being able to restore it on a different Host in future if needed, or maybe do a partial restore to fix a problems, say.

So, I'm trying to extract the contents on Win XP not Linux - assume the above suggestion is on a Linux box?

buglawton

Lorian wrote: »

...
1. gunzip it to get a file (maye 7zip etc will do this)
....

I've managed to get past step 1 already - remove 1st byte of the tgz file and it upacks into a single file called "dummy" that contains a file list then loads of binary stuff, 130 M worth. It's getting the 2nd step done that flummoxing me!