How to Backup a Web Site with the Linux Command Line (SSH)

Here is a great trick for compressing and backing-up your entire Web site with one Linux command:

The command to create an archive is tar -cjvf [archive file] [source directory]

So if you are logged into your server over SSH, you could backup your public_html directory with the following command:

tar -cjvf BACKUP_file.tar.bz2 ./public_html

You would then have a compressed file called BACKUP_file.tar.bz2 that would be easy to download over sFTP. It's much faster to download one compressed file than hundreds or thousands of individual, uncompressed files and directories.

To uncompress the file use the command:

tar -xjf archivefile.tar.bz2

If you are on Windows maybe try winrar, or just upgrade to Ubuntu.