Backup procedure

14/6/2018

A year or two ago I my bulk data storage drive died - it was 2TB and held information spanning back to around 2013 when I first got this computer. Of course, none of the data was backed up. I thought this would hurt, but it didn't. I've not thought twice about the data I had lost. I guess none of it was important.

Today, things are a little different. I keep semi up-to-date copies of things that are important to me (namely my anime collection and /home) on an external 1TB drive that I always have on my body. My thought process here is if both the drive I carry and my computer are destroyed at the same time, I'd probably be dead too.

I also keep a similarly semi up-to-date backup of my server on the same drive. This backup is never as up-to-date as I'd like.

I use cronjobs and bash scripts to perform daily backups of my personal computer and server. These are stored on a drive dedicated to backups always mounted on my computer, in the case of my server - a mere directory. Every now and then I copy these backups to the drive I carry everywhere. These are single tar files gzip compressed. I completely understand having the backups mounted and accessible is not the right way to do things.

I keep these backups for a short period after which they are deleted and replaced with newer ones.

Local personal computer backup cronjob and script:

# cronjob
# runs everyday at 1pm
0 13 * * * /home/daniel_j/programming/bash/backup/backup.sh
# delete backups older than 5 days
# runs every day at 3pm
0 15 * * * find /mnt/backups/tar_backups/old_backups/ -type f -mtime +5 -delete

# backup script
#!/bin/bash

# move the last backup performed into the old backups directory
mv /mnt/backups/tar_backups/*.tar.gz /mnt/backups/tar_backups/old_backups/
#backups
tar -cvpzf /mnt/backups/tar_backups/home-backup-$( date '+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S' ).tar.gz /home  > /dev/null
echo "buzz=500" >/dev/tcp/localhost/3001

(As a side note, the "echo "buzz" > /dev/tcp/localhost/3001" sends a command to an arduino that sounds a buzzer. I use it as an alert. I'll write more about this in another post.)

Server:

# cronjob
# backup
@daily /home/username/scripts/backup.sh
# delete backups older than 2 days
@daily find /home/username/backups/old_backups/ -type f -mtime +2 -delete

# backup script
#!/bin/bash

# move the last backups performed into the old backups directory
# (I backup both directories and an sql dump)
mv /home/username/backups/*.tar.gz /home/username/backups/old_backups/
mv /home/username/backups/*.sql /home/username/backups/old_backups/

# backups

# dump sql databases
/usr/bin/mysqldump --all-databases > /home/username/backups/dump-$( date '+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S' ).sql -u root -pr00tpassw0rd

# I backup everything valuable on /
tar -cvpzf /home/username/backups/backup-$( date '+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S' ).tar.gz --exclude=/home/username/backups --exclude=/proc --exclude=sys --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/media --exclude=/run --exclude=/dev --exclude=/var/www/desu/f --exclude=/home/username/old_server --one-file-system /  > /dev/null

As for my anime collection, that is simply an rsync command.