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5.4 Setting Parameters for Backups and Restoration

The file backup-specs specifies backup parameters for the backup and restoration scripts provided with tar. You must edit backup-specs to fit your system configuration and schedule before using these scripts.

Syntactically, backup-specs is a shell script, containing mainly variable assignments. However, any valid shell construct is allowed in this file. Particularly, you may wish to define functions within that script (e.g., see RESTORE_BEGIN below). For more information about shell script syntax, please refer to the definition of the Shell Command Language. See also Bash Features.

The shell variables controlling behavior of backup and restore are described in the following subsections.