backup to a central backup server with 7 day incremental
#!/bin/sh
# This script does personal backups to a rsync backup server. You will end up # with a 7 day rotating incremental backup. The incrementals will go # into subdirectories named after the day of the week, and the current # full backup goes into a directory called "current" # tridge@linuxcare.com
# directory to backup BDIR=/home/$USER
# excludes file - this contains a wildcard pattern per line of files to exclude EXCLUDES=$HOME/cron/excludes
# the name of the backup machine BSERVER=owl
# your password on the backup server export RSYNC_PASSWORD=XXXXXX
# the following line clears the last weeks incremental directory [ -d $HOME/emptydir ] || mkdir $HOME/emptydir rsync --delete -a $HOME/emptydir/ $BSERVER::$USER/$BACKUPDIR/ rmdir $HOME/emptydir
# now the actual transfer rsync $OPTS $BDIR $BSERVER::$USER/current
backup to a spare disk
I do local backups on several of my machines using rsync. I have an extra disk installed that can hold all the contents of the main disk. I then have a nightly cron job that backs up the main disk to the backup. This is the script I use on one of those machines.
#!/bin/sh
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
LIST="rootfs usr data data2"
for d in $LIST; do mount /backup/$d rsync -ax --exclude fstab --delete /$d/ /backup/$d/ umount /backup/$d done
DAY=`date "+%A"`
rsync -a --delete /usr/local/apache /data2/backups/$DAY rsync -a --delete /data/solid /data2/backups/$DAY
The first part does the backup on the spare disk. The second part backs up the critical parts to daily directories. I also backup the critical parts using a rsync over ssh to a remote machine.
mirroring vger CVS tree
The vger.rutgers.edu cvs tree is mirrored onto cvs.samba.org via anonymous rsync using the following script.
#!/bin/bash
cd /var/www/cvs/vger/ PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/freeware/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
RUN=`lps x | grep rsync | grep -v grep | wc -l` if [ "$RUN" -gt 0 ]; then echo already running exit 1 fi
Note in particular the initial rsync of the ChangeLog to determine if anything has changed. This could be omitted but it would mean that the rsyncd on vger would have to build a complete listing of the cvs area at each run. As most of the time nothing will have changed I wanted to save the time on vger by only doing a full rsync if the ChangeLog has changed. This helped quite a lot because vger is low on memory and generally quite heavily loaded, so doing a listing on such a large tree every hour would have been excessive.
automated backup at home
I use rsync to backup my wifes home directory across a modem link each night. The cron job looks like this
#!/bin/sh cd ~susan { echo date dest=~/backup/`date +%A` mkdir $dest.new find . -xdev -type f \( -mtime 0 -or -mtime 1 \) -exec cp -aPv "{}" $dest.new \; cnt=`find $dest.new -type f | wc -l` if [ $cnt -gt 0 ]; then rm -rf $dest mv $dest.new $dest fi rm -rf $dest.new rsync -Cavze ssh . samba:backup } >> ~/backup/backup.log 2>&1
note that most of this script isn't anything to do with rsync, it just creates a daily backup of Susans work in a ~susan/backup/ directory so she can retrieve any version from the last week. The last line does the rsync of her directory across the modem link to the host samba. Note that I am using the -C option which allows me to add entries to .cvsignore for stuff that doesn't need to be backed up.
Fancy footwork with remote file lists
One little known feature of rsync is the fact that when run over a remote shell (such as rsh or ssh) you can give any shell command as the remote file list. The shell command is expanded by your remote shell before rsync is called. For example, see if you can work out what this does:
