Backups are wonderful things that save hours upon hours of work, and stress, so long as they're actually made in the first place!
+Automatically taking backups allows for peace of mind that your work won't be lost forever whilst you go about your normal workflow..
+ +Create a backup script
+You can just call rsync, etc. in cron, but I recommend making a backup script (or a few) for each specific type of backup you want to make.
+Create the file where-ever you want to keep them, for the sake of this, it'll be a scripts directory in your home directory
+vim ~/scripts/backup_script.shAnd add whatever your backup scripts wants to do. If you've no idea, check out my rsync, and rdiff articles first.
+rdiff-backup $DIRECTORY_TO_BACKUP $DIRECTORY_TO_BACKUP_TO
+rdiff-backup --force --remove-older-than 2W $DIRECTORY_TO_BACKUP_TOThe above example will backup a directory, and remove any changes from 2 weeks ago.
+Now make the script executable
+chmod +x ~/scripts/backup_script.shAdd a cronjob
+Now for the automation part. Using cron we can set this script to run at many time variations. I recommend crontab guru to learn more about the expressions used for cron.
+Edit the cron table (crontab)
+crontab -eAnd add the following
+* */2 * * * /home/$USERNAME/scripts/backup_script.shThis will run the backup script every 2 hours, every day
+ +An advanced backup script
+An advantage of using a script for backups, is that it allows for more intricate functionality, you may not need to use this functionality, but it's greatly useful.
+The script below is something I wrote to backup my home directories for each of my servers. It's used to make hourly backups, and send these backups to a remote server daily at midnight.
+#!/bin/bash
+
+# Set locations to backup/backup to from the flags
+while getopts s:d:b:r:R:n: flag
+do
+ case "${flag}" in
+ d) DATA=${OPTARG};;
+ b) BACKUPDIR=${OPTARG};;
+ r) REMOTE=${OPTARG};;
+ R) REMOTEBACKUP=${OPTARG};;
+ n) NOW=${OPTARG};;
+ esac
+done
+
+# If the backup directory doesn't exist, make it
+mkdir -p $BACKUPDIR
+
+# Incremental backup of the directory locally
+rdiff-backup $DATA $BACKUPDIR
+# Don't keep changes from over 1W ago
+rdiff-backup --force --remove-older-than 1W $BACKUPDIR
+
+# Backup to remote
+# Get the hour/minute time
+TIME=$(date +%H%M)
+
+# If it's a midnight backup, or a manual backup with -n 1 flag set
+if [ "$TIME" = 0000 ] || [ "$NOW" = 1 ]
+then
+ # Create the remote directory for backup if it doesn't exist
+ ssh $REMOTE mkdir -p $REMOTEBACKUP
+
+ # Copy the backup to the remote location
+ # -e ssh makes it secure
+ rsync -azh -e ssh \
+ --delete \
+ $BACKUPDIR \
+ $REMOTE:$REMOTEBACKUP
+fi
+Which is called in the crontab like so
+# Hourly rdiff-backup of $DIRECTORY_TO_BACKUP
+0 */1 * * * $SCRIPT_LOCATION -d $DIRECTORY_TO_BACKUP -b $LOCATION_TO_SAVE_BACKUP -r $EXTERNAL_SERVER_SSH -R $EXTERNAL_SERVER_BACKUP_LOCATIONThis script can easily be used for many different directories, on each server without needing to change the script itself. All that's needed is to change the cronjob, and/or add another cronjob changing the values it takes.
+ +