I am using FTP on the NAS device as it means I don't need to have a computer on to send data to it. I like lftp as it lets you write a script of commands as a queue of commands to perform; so you can launch lftp with the -f option and specify a simple text file with all the commands you wish to perform.
I backup the contents of my /home and /var/www/. Also, before backing this up, I tar up /etc and dump the mysql databases into a directory in home/.
I put all this into a little script which runs once a week using cron.
Here is my script:
#!/bin/bash
#Backup script for server
#set variable of date for labelling
date=`date +%F`
cd /home/jonr/backupdata/
#remove oldest etc backup
rm `ls -t *etc-backup* | tail -n 1`
#Backup latest /etc/
tar -czvf /home/jonr/backupdata/${date}-etc-backup.tar /etc/
#remove oldest mysql backup
rm `ls -t *mysql* | tail -n 1`
#Dump mysql databases
mysqldump --all-databases > /home/jonr/backupdata/${date}_mysql_backup
#Backup to home NAS using lftp
lftp -f /home/jonr/bin/jcr-lftp-script
#Calculate the size of the amount of data sent during the backup from lftp's transfer log.
grep $date /home/jonr/.lftp/transfer_log | sed -r s/^.+0-// | sed -r s/\ [0-9].+$// > temp.log
i=0
for n in `cat temp.log`
do
i=`expr $i + $n`
done
echo $i'b'
rm temp.log
exit
Hopefully most of the comments explain what I am doing. Some things to note:
tar of /etc is being run as user 'jonr', not root, therefore there are some files/directories that jonr does not have permission to tar... I need to sort this out.
To perform the mysqldump, it requires root permissions, normally on the command line you would enter the -uroot and -p
This simply (in my case) contains this info:
[client]
user = root
password = (password)
So when any mysql command is called without -u -p options, it uses these credentials instead.
Similarly, for lftp, if I create a file called .netrc in my home directory containing:
machine server.address.com
login jonr
password (password)
...when lftp is launched it can be requested to connect to 'server.address.com' and will not ask for a user and password as it finds it in .netrc
Here is the contents of the lftp script I call:
open server.address.com
cd PUBLIC/jcrdev/
mirror -Ren /home/jonr/ home-backup
mirror -Ren /var/www/ varwww-backup
exit
Simply, it connects using the above credentials, changes to the appropriate directory, then uses the mirror command to 'put' data on th FTP server.
The -R option means 'reverse mirror', i.e. 'put' data instead of 'get' data. So put it on the FTP drive, rather than pull it off the FTP drive.
The -e option deletes files on the FTP drive which are not present in the source.
The -n option puts only NEWER data on the FTP drive, so only things that have changed basically get transferred.
This is basically behaving like rsync, only transferring data that it needs to to keep it up to date. I just can't use rsync to an FTP drive.
Things I need to improve on:
Don't use FTP (not very secure - SFTP better) Configure certain commands, like tar'ing up /etc to allow root priviledges without transmitting password)
If anyone spots problems or just wants to feedback some comments/advice, please do, I would appreciate it.
