Linux - transfer all files modified after a specific date to a new harddrive

Question

I recently had my second hard-drive of the past semester begin to fail on me and become unable to ghost to a new drive. I still had the first hd that failed so we ghosted that drive but now I need to get all the files and things that have changed since the date of the first ghosting (first failed hd -> second failed hd) onto the new drive (all files on second failed hd since a date -> third working hd). Is there an easy way to script this in the linux terminal or use another program?

I've looked into using the following commands but they haven't been successful and fail after the first few folders have been archived:

find . -type f -mtime -58 |xargs tar --no-recursion -czvf allmodified.tgz

tar czvf allmodified.tgz `find . -type f -mtime -58`

The find code works and locates all the files on the drive I need but I still can't find a way to get them to archive with file structure so that I can unpack the files on the new drive (third working hd) and they will be preserved where they were in the past 2 months.

I'm not the best at describing my problems so if you have confusion please ask questions and I'll do my best to answer them.

Any hints help, thank you so much!

Answer 1

They probably fail because you haven't safeguarded against whitespace in filenames in your second example. The invocation is a bit different:

find . -type f -mtime -58 -print0 | tar -czvf allmodified.tar.gz --null -T -

Here, find outputs file paths terminated by NUL characters. They are piped to tar, which reads input from stdin (-T -) delimited by null (--null). The --no-recursion isn't necessary since you will not include directories themselves in your tarball.

See also: GNU tar 1.27: 6.3 Reading Names from a File

You could then extract the archive from the same directory you took it, and it'd place the files in the directories they belong to. Note that tar will overwrite existing files upon extraction. To prevent that, use the --skip-old-files option.

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As for your second example, it will fail if a file or path contains whitespace, because tar sees the two files foo bar and baz (which find outputs) as three, i.e. tar foo bar baz. The proper way to deal with this is to pipe the output of find with -print0 to the next command, if that command has a switch to read from NUL-delimited input (which most GNU utilities do).