Alex Poole

I’ve been putting off writing a proper backup script for ages but actually its not rocket science!

The goal was to keep a month of rolling backups, totally automatically. I decided, rather than fiddling around with date comparisions, to just name the backup after the day portion of the date, so a month’s worth of backups is always available (after the first month.)

The server is a Plesk server, so all sites sit below /var/www/vhosts/

Here’s the script, with comments:

#!/bin/sh

#create 2 filenames
SQLFILE=backup_`date '+%e'`.sql
TGZFILE=backup_`date '+%e'`.tgz

#get full db backup
cd /var/www/vhosts
#delete old one if there
rm /var/www/vhosts/$SQLFILE
mysqldump --opt --all-databases -uadmin -pMySQL_password > $SQLFILE

#backup web, including the DB backup we've just done
cd /var/www
#delete old one if its there
rm /var/www/$TGZFILE
#use --exclude to ignore big fat log files that you can cope without
tar -zcvf $TGZFILE --exclude '*statistic*' --exclude '*.log' vhosts

#ftp to backup server

#My FTP login is in /root/.netrc but you could add it here instead.
#You'd use this command instead: ftp -n

#Then you'd add "user $USERNAME $PASSWORD" straight below the <<EOF

ftp myftpserver.net <<EOF
del $TGZFILE
put $TGZFILE
quit
EOF

#now I just move them somewhere out of the way on the server, keeping a month's worth here too
rm /root/backups/$SQLFILE
mv /var/www/vhosts/$SQLFILE /root/backups/$SQLFILE
rm /root/backups/$TGZFILE
mv /var/www/$TGZFILE /root/backups/$TGZFILE

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