Doing backup of servers scripts using tar/gzip/scp/rm

Swakoo · 11-30-2006, 04:38 AM

Hi guys,

I am looking to backup my scripts onto a backup server, thus creating a 7 days repository script database kind of thing.

But how do I pipe the entire command in one line? What I want to achieve is to tar the selected directory, gzip it, scp over to the backup server and then rm it from the web server.

Reason being this server that I am backing up, is kind of a staging server and thus space is pretty low. So I was wondering can I do it all in one shot. I have 7 folders each easily 4-5GB to backup.

matthewg42 · 11-30-2006, 05:28 AM

Do you expect to have one tar file per backup?

What you might do is have a script which creates a tar backup file with the day name in the filename, then copy that across to the remote machine, overwriting an old file if necessary.

tar can compress archives as it makes them, no need for a separate step for this. You should configure ssh to use public key authentication to allow remote login without password for the backup user. You can then use scp from a script to do the file transfer.

Something like this:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
cd /path/to/files/to/backup
backup_file="backup_$(date +%a).tar.gz"
tar zcf "$backup_file" * && 
  scp "$backup_file" remoteuser@remotehost:/path/to/backups &&
  rm * &&
  echo "all was OK" ||
  echo "error making $backup_file" |mailx -s "backup error" backupadmin@host.com

For this sort of thing to work, you have some setup to do:

mail delivery must be working
mailx must be installed
ssh public key auth must be set up (for scp)
the rm command must be correct!

Swakoo · 12-01-2006, 01:17 AM

yah one tar file per backup.

i was hoping to find a way to delete the tar files on the fly right after i send them over to the backup server as the space available is not enough - by using the | (what you call this?)

I guess I just have to split the commands up for now. hmm

matthewg42 · 12-01-2006, 05:51 AM

It is not the unix way for there to be one tool to rule them all. Almost all tasks of this type use more than one tool.

If you would consider a slightly different scheme, rsync might be better suited to your needs.

Swakoo · 12-05-2006, 02:09 AM

i've thought of rsync but was thinking that i don't need to sync, just need to maintain a 7days backup on another machine.

the only reason why i am thinking of this is because of the lack of hdd space to hold the tar files while scp-ing.

think i better solve the root of the problem first: the space constraint