[flexbackup-help] Don't know if there is interest ...

[Joe L. <la...@sc...>]

I wrote a few scripts to help turn flexbackup into a disk-to-usbdisk 
backup system, maintaining a set duration of backups.  You could 
accomplish much the same thing with some fancy crontab+shell scripts, 
but I prefer using Perl for anything moderately or more so complex.

The first is rmob.pl at 
http://downloads.scalableinformatics.com/downloads/backup/rmob.pl .  It 
will look over the names in the directory pointed to by 
--dir=/path/to/backup/files and remove any that are older than 
--age=number_of_days .  By default it will work in the current directory 
and remove only the back files that are older than 30 days.

The second is rotate_backup.pl, which will adjust a soft link to the 
backup directory (as specified in the /etc/flexbackup.conf file), to 
point to one of several usbdisk units hanging off /media/usbdisk1, 
/media/usbdisk2, ... , /media/usbdiskN .  Based upon the number of disks 
  (hardwired on the 6th line of the script), and the number of days in a 
month (hardwired to 31), it will "evenly" divide the month into 31/N 
slices, and set an index equal to the integer portion of (1+31/N) which 
is then used to construct the soft link to the appropriate USB2 hard 
disk.  You can set the particular directory where your usbdisk are 
mounted using the --dir=/path/to/usbdisk which the script will use as a 
template to create the soft link to --link=/path/to/link/to/for/backup .

Couple these two with a few USB2 drives, and a hotplug system that 
mounts things like this in /media/usbdisk*, as well as a flexbackup 
config which always backs up to the link (/media/backup in this case), 
and some simple crontabs

05 0 * * * /usr/sbin/rotate_backup.pl > /srv/backup/rotate-`date -I`.log 
2>&1
5  0  * * * /usr/sbin/rmob.pl --age 15 --dir /media/backup
30 0  1,15 * * /usr/bin/flexbackup -set all > 
/srv/backup/backup-all-`date -I`.log 2>&1
30 0  2-14,16-31 * * /usr/bin/flexbackup -set user -level differential > 
/srv/backup/backup-user-`date -I`.log 2>&1
30 6  2-14,16-31 * * /usr/bin/flexbackup -set system -level differential 
 > /srv/backup/backup-system-`date -I`.log 2>&1

(note: you could simply do incremental backups rather than differentials)

and you have a rather complete rotating backup system to USB2 media. 
Quite simple really.

Joe


-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: la...@sc...
web  : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423
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