incremental FTP backup program

[Roland Smith]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 10:55:54PM +0100, bsd wrote:

> Are there any specific scripting tools that I could use in order to achieve
> that ?

Well, /bin/sh and 'man sh' spring to mind. :-) Or use another scripting
language if you are more familiar with that, e.g. perl or python. But since
you are mainly invoking programs, a plain shell-script would be my first choice.

> From what you are describing a tool that would automate the dump process and
> take care of snapshots versions would be a must… ??

See e.g. the dodumps script on my scripts page; http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/software/scripts.html

It just names the dumps 'filesystem-dumplevel-date.dump',
e.g. root-0-20091217.dump. You could extend this script to transfer the dumps
via ftp, and remove old dumps from the FTP site. After testing, you could even
run it from cron.

Start off with a level 0 dump, and then perform higher level dumps as often as
you need. Google for 'dump levels', and you'll find lots of different schemes,
e.g. http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-5093/bkupconcepts-21?a=view

I would urge you to keep things simple. The more complicated the your
solution, the easier things can go wrong.

One caveat about dump though. If one of your filesystems contains just one big
database in a huge file, dump will copy the whole file even if just one byte
has changed. In such a case you should see if the database has tools to just
copy the records changed since the last backup and use that instead.


Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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