You can mantain a list of files that you with to backup into a file and tar it when you wish. tar czvf tarfile.tar.gz -T list_file where list_file is a simple list of what you want to include into the tar i.e: /etc/smb.conf /root/myfile /etc/ppp (all files into the /etc/ppp directory) /opt/gnome/html/gnome-dev-info.html