Creating a Web Based Backup System With PEAR’s Archive_Tar package

I needed to create a web based backup system and the natural choice of language for the task was php (although I am looking into some perl modules as well). After tweaking with the thought of using a shell command to run a tar command I looked into PEAR’s Archive_Tar package. The class is fairly straightforward to use, my code to backup one particular directory was:

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', 1);
require_once 'Archive/Tar.php';
PEAR::setErrorHandling(PEAR_ERROR_DIE);
 
$tar = new Archive_Tar("data.tar");
$dir = "../";
$handle = opendir("$dir");
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle)))
{
	echo "$file \n";
	echo "";
	$tar->add($dir . "/" . $file) or die ("Could not add file!");
}
closedir($handle);

Telling PEAR to die on errors, and spit out the error message was especially helpful when debugging the script. In order for the script to run from a browser, the user running the script (apache in my case), must have write permissions on the directory the script is running from.