Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Directory Back-Up

[smkied]

Hello!

I would like to make some kind of script (probably .sh?) that automatically takes a directory, makes a copy of it then makes a gzip tar and then shoots it over to an FTP server. I would like this to happen twice a day (ie. every 12 hours).

How do I go about it? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[smkied]

Oh I would also like the file name of the gzip tar to be <sometexthere>-YYYY.MM.DD.TT.TT.bak.tar

So for example:

mydomain-2008.08.01.16.53.bak.tar

[evilghost]

tar --create --gzip --file=- /path/to/directory|ncftpput -c -u username -p password -P 21 ftp.myhost.com /path/to/upload/directory/`date +%Y.%m.%d.%H.%M.%S.bak.tgz`

Then, just 'crontab -e' to schedule the above command accordingly.

[LnxtecH]

You may copy the script below to /etc/cron.daily

#!/bin/bash

FTP_HOSTNAME='Give remote ftp hostname here';
FTP_USERNAME='Give ftp username here';
FTP_PASSWORD='give ftp password here';
LOCAL_DIR='path to the folder to be backed up';
REMOTE_DIR='Relative path of the Remote folder where the backups are to be stored';

FILE_NAME=backup-`date +%d-%m-%y`.tar.gz;

# Tar the Directory
tar -zcvf $FILE_NAME $LOCAL_DIR;

#FTP the tar backup to the remote server.

ftp -n $FTP_HOSTNAME << EOF
quote USER $FTP_USERNAME
quote PASS $FTP_PASSWORD
cd $REMOTE_DIR
put $FILE_NAME
quit
EOF

# Remove the local tar file
rm -f $FILE_NAME;
exit;

[CodyRo]

I would recommend SCP over FTP .. or even SFTP.

[smkied]

Thanks for all the input!

When I run the script as root, I get:

-bash: ./backup.cron: Permission denied

Any suggestions?

[evilghost]

chmod +x ./backup.cron

[balajee]

highly recommend SCP transfer. You could share the keys of SSH between the servers to skip the authentication while transferring the data.

[smkied]

The problem is that the destination server doesn't give me SSH or SSL. It's just a basic shared web hosting account, so SFTP is definitely out of the question.

[balajee]

probably this is time for all hosting providers to start giving SSH/SCP. In the mean time FTP looks like the only option available.

[smkied]

Hmmm so now, after doing chmod +x, when I try to run the script I get this:

[root@srv01 cron.daily]# ./backup.cron
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

And then it goes on to show like a whole list of the contents of that directory and stuff, but doesn't actually do any backing-up. What's going on?

[LnxtecH]

That message is from the tar command and its normal. If there are no other errors then I can assure its working.

Have you checked the remote directory in the FTP server? Can you see the tar backup there?

[smkied]

There are no files in the remote FTP.

[LnxtecH]

You can catch me at bkays001 (AIM) and I will help you to set up the script.