UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Suggestions and Feedback A zip script

Anyone ever here of a script that allows you to zip and download a whole web directory... for backup purposes. Or could that easily be created in php?

A point and click solution to backup uploaded files would be very handy. Especially here to backup the hacks. FTP is a pain.... as is shell access.

Found one here: http://www.optimall-soft.com/products/web_archiver/
But it costs money.

Couldn't find anything else though. But it shouldn't be too hard to write a script to zip a folder.

Thanks I will check that out.

$29 isnt' too bad for piece of mind.

Unless you'd care to give me some pointers/code tidbits to zipping a directory.

I did find a function library to handle zip files, but didn't realize that they also had a finished script to use the functions. You can find the script here:
http://www.phpconcept.net/phpzip/index.en.php

There's not much info in english, but it seems to be what you are asking for.

On a *nix server, it's better to use tar and gzip if possible, since tar preserves the file attributes.

Yeah, and I think that second script is supposed to use that. Although it didn't seem to work that well on php4 with register globals off or with mozilla. Couldn't find out how to actually move files into the archive it created either.

If I'd write something, I think I'd just write a quick directory selector script and pass the path to a small script that uses system() to call on tar. But using system() is always risky, so some checks should be done.

You may want to have a look at
http://www.phpclasses.org

Especially for the class names "Zip/Tar/GZip Archives"

Description:
Allows the creation of zip, tar, and gzip archives, and extraction of tar and gzip.
Supports relative paths/no paths, comments, and recursing through subdirectories.
Can write file to disk, allow user to download directly, or can return file contents in a string.
It doesn't require any external programs to run. PHP must be compiled with '--with-zlib' because gzcompress, gzdeflate, and gzinflate are used for gzip and zip files, but creation of tar files will work regardless of whether or not this option is set.

You'll have to register to download it, but it's free.
phpclasses.org is a great resource for all kind of php classes.

Thank you.

I couldnt' figure out how to buy the first one. And I couldn't make the second one work. I'll give this a go.

Well this got me closer.

I downloaded the attached classes and functions... but I'm still having trouble making it work.

Then I tried a script like this. And it does produce a file for download. But the contents of the file aren't right. I'm trying to tar and zip a directory. Like to tar/zip and download a threads attachment directory.

I think $dirlist should contain a relative path from your working directory you specified as "/mnt/drive2/joshuapettit/htdocs"

I like tar/gzip:

tar -zcvpf /path/to/save/backup.tar.gz . --directory /directory/to/backup

z = compress
c = create new archive
v = verbose (just to see what its doing)
p = preserve permissions
f = the path following this is where to save the file

I just backed up my whole 1.5 GB site and moved it to a new server. Ran that command from my home directory, it packaged it all up perfectly. Transfered it to my new server, put the tarball in the home directory and ran this:

tar -zxvpf backup.tar.gz --directory /home/myfolder/

It was great, it extracted all of my directories and preserved all of the file permissions in a matter of minutes

If you want and don't use a control panel like cPanel and such, you could create a cron job to do this every night if you wanted.. to run the backup of a specified folder and store them on the server

Josh, is that thing making a gz file and you're naming it with a .tar extension?

Ok - so that would be one issue. <doah>
<slaps head>