[BackupPC-users] Archive to USB disk script

[Erik M. <e.s...@wi...>]

At my place of employment we have BackupPC running on a Debian/Sarge 
machine with a 600 GB RAID-5 array. It works great. We had a need to 
copy backups to some portable medium for off-site backups of critical 
data. Less frequent backups are done with DVD-R. For more frequent ones 
we chose to use portable 300GB USB disks. I created a script which will 
automate the filling of the disk.

It is quite simple. The script does the following:
  * Locates the USB disk device using an EXT2/3 disk label
  * Mounts the disk
  * Reads a list of BackupPC host names from a file and performs an 
archive of the latest backup(filled) for the hosts
  * It stores it on the archives on the USB disk in a directory named 
with the time the script started.
  * Unmounts the disk
  * Sends an email with the details of the above operations and some 
other info
  * Email is sent when any step fails

With this script, my routine is simply:
  * Wait for the email notification (read it to make sure the disk was 
umounted OK)
  * Remove the disk and replace it with another one(we have three in our 
rotation)
  * Periodically remove old backups from the disk when it is too full 
for another run(This could be automated at some point)

Get it here:

http://willystreet.coop/oss/arch2usb/index.php

There is no support for this. Please do not email me with problems 
unless you have located a bug. Patches are  accepted of course.