This beginner course develops a practical Linux workflow for packaging, compressing, restoring, transferring, and validating backup files. Through five guided labs, you will work with tar and zip archives, create date-stamped copies, and verify a simulated remote transfer with a checksum.
The final maintenance challenge applies a safety-first archive-and-purge sequence: identify only the prepared log files, create a compressed archive, inspect its contents before deletion, and remove the original logs while preserving the backup and unrelated files.
What You Will Learn
- Create an uncompressed tar archive, list its contents, and extract it to a chosen directory
- Build and restore gzip-compressed tar archives and compare their size with plain tar files
- Generate ISO-style dates and use variables or command substitution in backup filenames
- Create an MD5 checksum file and verify a copied archive with
md5sum -c - Transfer an archive and its checksum over SSH with
scpto a simulated destination - Install zip tools and create, inspect, and extract a recursive zip archive
- Select only
.logfiles with a shell wildcard and record the target list - Verify a compressed log archive before deleting its prepared source files
Who This Course Is For
This course is for Linux beginners, support technicians, and aspiring system or DevOps administrators who want hands-on foundations in ad hoc archives, backup copies, transfer verification, and cautious cleanup.
Prerequisites: Basic terminal navigation, file operations, shell variables, command substitution, wildcards, output redirection, and sudo; no prior backup-tool experience is required.
Learning environment: A provided Ubuntu-based LabEx terminal with prepared directories and archives, local SSH transfer to /tmp, disposable log files, and installable zip utilities.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is the course structured?
Five labs provide guided practice. The sixth item is a log maintenance challenge where you identify, archive, verify, and then delete only prepared .log sources with less guidance.
Will I write an automated backup or log-rotation script?
No. Despite the challenge title, you execute the archive-and-purge commands manually. Scheduling, reusable shell scripts, retention policies, and logrotate configuration are not part of this course.
Does the transfer lab require another server?
No. It uses scp over SSH to copy backup.tar.gz and its checksum to /tmp on localhost, simulating the source-to-destination workflow on one lab machine.
Is MD5 presented as secure proof that a backup is trustworthy?
No. The lab uses MD5 to detect accidental content changes after copying and notes that stronger hashes are preferred for security-sensitive validation. A matching checksum alone does not authenticate who supplied the file.
