The script made use of the following tools: date, cat, tar, mv, and rm. That’s it. The script will create backups with the date in the file name and then move the backups to a central location. Without further adieu, let’s get to the script.

#! /bin/sh

TMP=”/tmp/”

#Format the date in YEAR-MO-DY format
TODAY=`date +%F`

# Check to see if there is a lastbackup file in /tmp, if not create it,
# if so then set LAST equal to $TODAY
if [ -f /tmp/lastbackup ]; then
LAST=`cat /tmp/lastbackup`
else
LAST=$TODAY
fi

# Set the web directory backup name to the following
WEB_FILENAME=”inc-”$TODAY”-web.tar.gz”

# Set database backup name to the following
DB_FILENAME=”inc-”$TODAY”-db.tar.gz”

# this tars up my web directory into web.tar.gz tarball.
/bin/tar -czf $TMP$WEB_FILENAME –after-date=$LAST /var/www/html

# Move the web back to the backup directory
/bin/mv $TMP$WEB_FILENAME /data

# Remove web backup file from temp director
rm $TMP$WEB_FILENAME

# this tars up my database directory into $TODAY-db.tar.gz tarball.
/bin/tar -czf $TMP$DB_FILENAME –after-date=$LAST /var/lib/mysql

# Move the backup database to the backup directory
/bin/mv $TMP$DB_FILENAME /data

# Remove web backup file from temp directory
rm $TMP$DB_FILENAME

What I wanted this to do is create daily backups and move the backups to the /data directory on the drive housing the server. These backups will be saved for one month. After the month is completed i have a second script that deletes the months backups prior to running the next backup (so there is always a backup to fall to). How I made use of this script is simple. I save the script (called backup.sh) in the root user directory and create a second script called rm_backups.sh that looks like this:

#! /bin/sh

rm /data/*gz

With these two files in place I create two cron entries. The first cron entry is for running the backup.sh script and looks like:

0 23 * * *     ~/backup.sh

The second cron entry is for running the rm_backups.sh script and looks like:

0 20 1 * *     ~/rm_backups.sh

Both of the above cron jobs are created as the root user.

Final Thoughts

Naturally this solution could be easily modified (using such tools rsync) to set up an offsite backup solution. What should be obvious is that creating a simple, flexible server backup system on Linux is easy. With the help of a little ingenuity, you can create your own automated backup service.

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Tame is easy to use. Just install the application on your system and pick an application from one of the running processes. That application will be monitored from then on. The only other information that have to be specified are the folder that should be backed up after that process terminates and the backup folder that will contain the backup of the data.

That’s pretty easy, ain’t it? The While that is the main use of Tame it does offer another way to backup files. Next to the so called Program Closing Backups System Timed Applications are available.

tame

This comes closer to normal backup operations on a system. The user can specify a time, a folder that should be backed up and a destination folder for the backup data and the backups will be started at that time if the computer is running. Folders can be local folders or folders on a network or backup server.

Tame requires the Microsoft .net framework 2.0 or higher. No information on operating system compatibility. It runs fine on Windows XP Service Pack 3.

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• Zip Encrypt Ftp Backups (1)

ZIPEncryptFTP is a C# command-line program, you will need the .NET 2.0 framework runtime to run it. It will write to the Application eventlog, so you need to run it the first time with administrator privileges, to register ZIPEncryptFTP with the eventlog.

To use the program you will have to use the command line. If you wanted for instance to backup the contents of the directory c:\temp, use the password:test to encrypt the folder(s) with AES and upload it to the ftp 192.168.1.100 with the username test and the password pass you would do the following:

ZIPEncryptFTP /directory:c:\test /password:test /url:ftp://192.168.1.100 /ftpuser:test /ftppassword:pass

You can add more than one directory by simply adding another /directory parameter to ZipEncryptFtp.

You can use ZipEncryptFtp to encrypt the data again but it needs to be retrieved with a ftp program before. To decode the file you need to use the following command:

ZIPEncryptFTP /password:test /infile:test /outfile:test.zip

Everything is done in memory, no temporary (ZIP) files are created. The ZIP file is created and encrypted in memory.

The password is converted to a 256 bit key, and the initialization vector is generated at random. The effect of this is that encrypting the same file twice will yield 2 completely different encrypted files.

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