From: Santhosh Kumar

To: SPC Lab

Dear all,

There are simple and efficient ways to back-up your important data periodically and more importantly automatically, if you are using Linux. In the following I will briefly explain a way to automatically schedule the back-up daily.

1) Install the package rsync. “rsync” is an excellent package that can synchronize incrementally. That is if you want to back-up a folder containing three files and if you have modified only one file since your last back-up, rsync observes this and updates only the necessary file.

If you are using Ubuntu/Debian, do:

$ sudo apt-get install rsync

2) Download the scripts.zip attached with this email and extract it into your home folder.

3) Open the file scripts/backup_script.sh (inside the extracted scripts folder) and edit the following two variables:

LOCAL_FOLDER=/home/USER/Desktop/Recent_Project BACKUP_FOLDER=/media/USER_NASBOX/BackUp

If you are, say, backing up the entire desktop, then change the LOCAL_FOLDER line to: LOCAL_FOLDER=/home/YOUR_LOGIN_NAME/Desktop

If you are backing up the data into the NAS Box and if you have mounted your personal NASBOX folder in /media/MY_NASBOX and want your back-up done in the folder “BackUp” inside NASBOX, then change the BACKUP_FOLDER line to: BACKUP_FOLDER=/media/MY_NASBOX/BackUp

Save the file and close.

4) Open the file scripts/setcron.sh and edit the line number 4, which looks like: echo “53 13 * * * /bin/bash $PWD/backup_script.sh” > $TMP_FILE

13 and 53 represent the time of the day at which the back-up is done. If you want to start the back-up at 4:12 PM (16:12), then replace 53 with 12 and 13 with 16. Please note that the minute value should come before the hour value. The line, after modification, should look like: echo “12 16 * * * /bin/bash $PWD/backup_script.sh” > $TMP_FILE

Please pick an arbitrary convenient time for the back-up, so that your back-up time does not clash with the others using the same back-up procedure. This will reduce the load on the NAS Box.

5) If you have extracted the scripts folder into home directory, do: $ cd $HOME/scripts $ ./setcron.sh

That is all! Though this email looks quite lengthy, the underlying procedure is fairly simple. Do try this and inform me if you have any issues or questions or suggestions. Thank You.

The required scripts can be found here.