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Is there a way to tar extract without clobbering?

I am installing 12.04 and want to restore my data from 10.10. Anything 12.04 specific I would like to keep, that is I do not want the tar'd 10.10 version to be extracted. If I do a general restore such files as .bashrc will be clobbered. Is there a way to avoid this?

Edit: I would note that a booted 12.04 ISO disk image allows an upgrade from 10.10 (or whatever) and it offers to keep old data. I tried this but it complained some applications might be left broken after the upgrade. I decided to just reboot and do a clean install.

H2ONaCl
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2 Answers2

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I have difficulty understanding what you want but if you made a tar file of your whole system I believe you made a very large tar file that has not a real purpose unless you completely restore the tar file. If you wanted to save your own documents you should have made a backup of those documents and nothing else.

After saying that tar has several nifty options ...

--keep-old-files

This will not overwrite existing files.

--keep-newer-files

This will keep all files that have a newer timestamp as is.

--no-overwrite-dir

This will leave the metadata of an existing directory as is.

A manual for tar can be found here.

But I would advice extracting the tar file on another medium and manually restore those files. It is the safest method.

Rinzwind
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    Even with --keep-newer-files and --no-overwrite-dir, extracting an old full system backup onto a new system will leave your system in a goofed up state since many files that shouldn't be there will be extracted. You should just open the archive in the gui with file-roller and extract the specific files you want to your home directory. – psusi Apr 30 '12 at 13:37
  • I agree as per my last line in my answer :) – Rinzwind Apr 30 '12 at 13:48
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    @Rinzwind, you are right, my archive has a faulty design. Many exclusions and still not enough exclusions so it's a mess and dangerous to restore since it would be Maverick overwriting onto Precise. My next archive will be strictly inclusions. Your suggestion about manual restoration is a good one. – H2ONaCl May 04 '12 at 07:19
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From tar(1):

 -k, --keep-old-files
       don't replace existing files when extracting

Seems clear to me. If files in the tarball are stored relatively to your old homedir:

tar xvkf backup.tar.gz -C ~
Lekensteyn
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  • does this also work while compressing. – nyxee Aug 16 '17 at 18:36
  • @nyxee It also works when trying to extract a compressed archive (e.g. tar xvkzf backup.tar.gz -C ~). I don't think it is recognized when you try to create a new archvie (tar czf foo.tar.gz foo/) if you are asking about that. – Lekensteyn Aug 18 '17 at 07:18