The Road to Ubuntu - Backup Salvation

Adam Turner
Sunday, 04 November 2007 19:06

Opinion and Analysis

After the steep learning curve of developing my local backup script, creating one for FTP proved relatively easy.

Googling for FTP file backup scripts, I came across lftp and this script for SQL backups . I picked through for what I needed and cobbled together my own script, tarballing the files (with a timestamp filename) to reduce bandwidth needs. It looks like this;

# Source
sou="/windows/data/Documents and Settings/Adam/My Documents/Adam/Work/AAA In Progress"

# Destination folder on FTP server
des="backup"

# Number of copies to keep
count=96

### FTP SERVER Login info ###
FTPU="FTP-SERVER-USER-NAME"
FTPP="FTP-SERVER-PASSWORD"
FTPS="FTP-SERVER-IP-ADDRESS"

# delete oldest folder
lftp -u $FTPU,$FTPP -e "rm -rf /${des}/${count}; quit" $FTPS

#rename folders
while [ $count -gt 1 ]
    do
      old=`expr $count - 1`
lftp -u $FTPU,$FTPP -e "mv /${des}/${old} /${des}/${count}; quit" $FTPS
     count=`expr $count - 1`
done

# tarball files in temp folder
now=$(date +%y-%m-%d_%H:%M)
tar -czf /tmp/backup_${now}.tar.gz "${sou}"/*

# make new dir on server, upload tarball, delete temp tarball (-E)
lftp -u $FTPU,$FTPP -e "mkdir /${des}/1; cd /${des}/1; mput -E /tmp/backup_${now}.tar.gz; quit" $FTPS

I tried to use "find ${des}/* -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;" to delete old folders, but I couldn't get it to work with lftp.

All that was left now was to add the two scripts to crontab (the task scheduler) so they'll run automatically - every 10 minutes to the network drive and every 30 minutes to the FTP site;

10 * * * * /home/adam/Documents/scripts/backup-inprog-hyperspace.sh
30 * * * * /home/adam/Documents/scripts/backup-inprog-ftp.sh

So that's how I found backup salvation with Ubuntu. While it was a steep learning curve, most of my problems were due to the fact I was using a FAT32 network drive - a legacy from Windows World. Moving to any new OS is always going to present challenges, so I'm not holding a grudge against the penguin. Now we've got this backup problem sorted, hopefully we can get down to business.

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