Automate Backups on Linux

By Martyn Honeyford
2005-04-20

Simple Backups

This article follows a step-by-step approach that is quite straightforward once you follow the basic steps.

Let's begin with a simple, yet powerful archive mechanism on our way to a more advanced distributed backup solution. Let's examine a handy script called arc, which will allow us to create backup snapshots from a Linux shell prompt.

Listing 1. The arc shell script

#!/bin/sh

   tar czvf $1.$(date +%Y%m%d%-%H%M%S).tgz $1

   exit $?

The arc script accepts a single file or directory name as a parameter and creates a compressed archive file with the current date embedded into the resulting archive file's name. For example, if you have a directory called beoserver, you can invoke the arc script, passing it the beoserver directory name to create a compressed archive such as: beoserver.20040321-014844.tgz

The use of the date command to embed a date and timestamp helps to organize your archived files. The date format is Year, Month, Day, Hour, Minutes, and Seconds -- although the use of the seconds field is perhaps a bit much. View the man page for the date command (man date) to learn about other options. Also, in Listing 1, we pass the -v (verbose) option to tar. This causes tar to display all of the files it's archiving. Remove the -v option if you'd like the backup to proceed silently.

Listing 2. Archiving the beoserver directory

$ ls

  arc  beoserver

  $ ./arc beoserver

  beoserver/

  beoserver/bookl.dat

  beoserver/beoserver_ab_off

  beoserver/beoserver_ab_on

  $ ls

  arc  beoserver  beoserver.20040321-014844.tgz

Tutorial Pages:
» No Excuses: do-it-Yourself, Secure, Distributed Network Backups Made Easy
» Simple Backups
» Advanced Backups
» Secure Remote Access Using Public/Private Keys
» Automating Machine Access Using SSH-Agent
» Simplifying Key Access Using Keychain
» Scripting a Backup Process
» Scheduling
» Verifying Your Backups
» Additional Security Precautions
» Conclusion
» Resources

First published by IBM DeveloperWorks

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