Backup with tar

tar [operation] [option] target source
There are three commonly used operations `—create’, `—list’, and `—extract’ or ‘-c’, ‘-t’ and ‘-x’
And there are six commonly used options ‘-C’, ‘-f’, ‘-j’, ‘-p’, ‘-v’ and ‘-z’.

• ‘-C’, change to directory 
• ‘-f’, use archive file or device F (default “-“, meaning stdin/stdout)
• ‘-j’, filter archive through bzip2, use to decompress *.bz2 files
• ‘-p’, extract all protection information
• ‘-v’, verbosely list files processed
• ‘-z’, filter the archive through gzip

Examples:

• Verbosely create a tar archive name.tar from sourceFiles or sourceDirectory
  tar -cvf name.tar sourceFiles
  tar -cvf sourceDirectory/
• Verbosely create a tar file name.tar.gz from souceFiles and compress it use gzip
  tar -czf name.tar.gz sourceFiles
• Extract name.tar.gz from name.tar.gz
  tar -xzf name.tar.gz
• Extract one file test.txt from name.tar.gz
  tar -xzf name.tar.gz test.txt
• List archive members from name.tar
  tar -tvf name.tar