How to Create a tar+bzip2 Website Archive While Ignoring VCS Folders (.git and others)

🗄️ How to Create a tar+bzip2 Website Archive While Ignoring VCS Folders (.git and others)

When backing up web projects, you often need to create a compact archive without including version‑control system directories such as .git, .svn, .hg, or .bzr.
These folders can take up hundreds of megabytes and are completely unnecessary in a production backup.

On Linux, this is very easy — you just need to use
tar
with the
–exclude-vcs
option.

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🔍 Why You Should Exclude VCS Directories

Folders like

.git/

contain:

• full commit history
• temporary files
• caches
• internal indexes

As a result:

• your archive becomes 5–20× larger than needed
• you waste storage space
• backup creation and transfer take longer

For production backups, it’s best to leave them out.

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🧰 The

–exclude-vcs

Option in tar

GNU Tar provides a special option:

--exclude-vcs

It automatically excludes all standard version‑control directories:

• .git
• .svn
• .hg
• .bzr
• _darcs
• CVS

This is the most convenient way to create a clean archive.

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🧩 Example: Creating a tar.bz2 Website Archive Without VCS Folders

Let’s say your website is located at:

/home/taras/websites/shkodenko.com/

You want to create an archive in your home directory under

_backups

, with a timestamp in the filename.

✔️ Ready‑to‑use command:

cd /home/taras/websites/shkodenko.com/
tar --exclude-vcs -cpjf ~/_backups/_shkodenko.com__no_vcs__$(date +'%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M').tar.bz2 ./

What this command does:

• cd ...

  — moves into the website root

• tar

  — runs the archiver

• --exclude-vcs

  — excludes all VCS directories

• -c

  — create an archive

• -p

  — preserve file permissions

• -j

  — use bzip2 compression (better than gzip)

• -f

  — specify the output filename

• $(date +'%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M')

  — adds date and time to the filename

• ./

  — archives the current directory

The resulting file will look like:

_shkodenko.com__no_vcs__2026-05-03_15-20.tar.bz2

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📦 Why bzip2?

tar.bz2

archives usually:

• compress better than gzip (

  .tar.gz

  )

• work slower, but produce smaller files

For website backups, this is often the ideal choice.

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🧪 Verifying the Archive

List archive contents:

tar -tjf archive.tar.bz2

Extract the archive:

tar -xpjf archive.tar.bz2

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📝 Conclusion

Creating a clean website backup without

.git

and other VCS directories is simple.
Just use

tar

with the

--exclude-vcs

option, and you’ll get a neat, compact, and production‑ready archive.

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