RHCSA Practical Lab Series – Creating and Compressing Archives

🔍 Lab 12: Archiving and Compressing Files with tar and bzip2

📌 Objective

In this lab, you will:

✔ Create a compressed tar archive (/root/system_backup.tar.bz2)
✔ Archive the entire /etc directory
✔ Use bzip2 compression to reduce file size
✔ Verify the archive integrity

📌 Step 1: Install bzip2 (if not already installed)

🔹 Ensure the bzip2 package is installed:

[root@node1 ~]# yum -y install bzip2

📌 Explanation:

• bzip2 is a high-compression tool used to compress tar archives efficiently.
• The -y flag automatically confirms installation.

✅ Once installed, proceed to Step 2.

📌 Step 2: Create a Compressed Archive of /etc

🔹 Use tar to archive and compress /etc:

[root@node1 ~]# tar -cvjf /root/system_backup.tar.bz2 /etc

📌 Explanation:

• tar → The archiving command
• -c → Creates a new archive
• -v → Displays verbose output (lists files being added)
• -j → Uses bzip2 compression
• -f /root/system_backup.tar.bz2 → Specifies the archive filename
• /etc → The directory being archived

✅ If successful, system_backup.tar.bz2 will be created in /root/.

📌 Step 3: Verify the Archive Integrity

🔹 Check the file type to confirm it is a compressed tar.bz2 archive:

[root@node1 ~]# file /root/system_backup.tar.bz2

📌 Expected Output:

/root/system_backup.tar.bz2: bzip2 compressed data, block size = 900k

✅ If this output appears, the archive is correctly compressed.

🔹 List the contents of the archive without extracting:

[root@node1 ~]# tar -tvjf /root/system_backup.tar.bz2

📌 This allows you to verify that /etc was properly archived.

📌 Step 4: Extract and Verify the Backup (Optional)

🔹 Extract the archive to /tmp/test_restore for verification:

[root@node1 ~]# mkdir /tmp/test_restore
[root@node1 ~]# tar -xvjf /root/system_backup.tar.bz2 -C /tmp/test_restore

📌 Explanation:

• -x → Extracts the archive
• -C /tmp/test_restore → Extracts files into the /tmp/test_restore directory

🔹 Verify extracted files:

[root@node1 ~]# ls /tmp/test_restore/etc

✅ If the contents match the original /etc, the backup was successful!

✅ Final Summary

✔ Installed bzip2 for high-compression archiving
✔ Created a compressed tar archive (.tar.bz2) of /etc
✔ Verified the archive integrity and contents
✔ (Optional) Extracted and confirmed the backup files

📌 Next Lab: Creating a Custom Container Image

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