[Discuss] Backup Scripts / Software

[John Blomfield]

Now that I have reverted to backup strategies and the ext4 file system 
and decided to consider BTRFS at some future time when I understand how 
best to use it reliably; I have been upgrading my backup software. I 
have been using cron job RSYNC scripts plus some KDialog popup dialogs 
to accomplish my daily, weekly and monthly backups and I came across the 
following example from the http://rsync.samba.org/examples.html site 
that I thought might be of interest to others.

backup to a central backup server with 7 day incremental


#!/bin/sh

# This script does personal backups to a rsync backup server. You will 
end up
# with a 7 day rotating incremental backup. The incrementals will go
# into subdirectories named after the day of the week, and the current
# full backup goes into a directory called "current"
# tridge at linuxcare.com

# directory to backup
BDIR=/home/$USER

# excludes file - this contains a wildcard pattern per line of files to 
exclude
EXCLUDES=$HOME/cron/excludes

# the name of the backup machine
BSERVER=owl

# your password on the backup server
export RSYNC_PASSWORD=XXXXXX


########################################################################

BACKUPDIR=`date +%A`
OPTS="--force --ignore-errors --delete-excluded --exclude-from=$EXCLUDES
       --delete --backup --backup-dir=/$BACKUPDIR -a"

export PATH=$PATH:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin

# the following line clears the last weeks incremental directory
[ -d $HOME/emptydir ] || mkdir $HOME/emptydir
rsync --delete -a $HOME/emptydir/ $BSERVER::$USER/$BACKUPDIR/
rmdir $HOME/emptydir

# now the actual transfer
rsync $OPTS $BDIR $BSERVER::$USER/current

###########################################################################

I thought the this was a neat concept so I have adopted it for my design 
of a Qt4/C++ GUI program that provides me with better popups to provide 
me with constant feedback on backup progress. A backup can sometime take 
a long time and I like to know what's happening at any particular 
moment, if any errors are occurring and what they are. Instead of the 7 
day rotation used in the above script I have generalized it to store 
backup changes for any number (eg 10, 19, 33, anything) of backup 
occurrences. My GUi is now up and running as a field trial. I just have 
to clean up the code and perhaps design a configuration UI rather than 
manually modify the code to change backup occurrences and target 
directories. The program is not your typical GUI since it must run 
automatically under cron with no user interaction hence the 
configuration UI must be run separately from the cron job.

I have also put launchers on my desktop so that one click starts a 
backup locally or to external backup drive.

I was also inspired to adopt the above approach by the Dropbox web 
facility that provides you with a list of past snapshots enabling you to 
recover old versions of files. The rotating backups above are 
essentially snapshots of past changes. Some may think the above bash 
script is quite adequate for job but I just love visual GUI feedback.

John


-- 
John Blomfield
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Old John B's Linux Notes http://www.oldjohnbslinux.wordpress.com