tarohsnap is a shell script cron job that creates backups with tarsnap.
The name is a play on the words: Tar? Oh snap! and, of course tarsnap
This was first developed on a non-systemd system; changes may have to be made if you use a systemd-based distro
My current design goals are:
- Backup specific files/directories using variables within the script
- Grandparent/Parent/Child backup schedule
- Focus on bash functionality first, then more portable shell code later
- One backup per day for $hold_days, 12 monthly backups and 1 annual backup
- Deletes archived files in a given length of time
- Keeps a log file of all activities performed
- Error handling 04 May 2020, specifically exiting if tarsnap does not exist on the system and logging it to the system's log
Future goals:
- More shell agnostic design
- Incorporate conf file,
/etc/tarohsnap.confto house user-defined variables - Error handling
- System logfile location rather than local; tentatively, I am planning on
/var/log/tarohsnap.log- To handle privilege escalation, I may have to break up the script into multiple files
- Because of this, I may have to create an install procedure; not sure yet if I want to visit this with a shell script
- Either local system notification on error/completion or email notification ** IN PROGRESS **
- Customize
tarohsnap.shand place it in a folder that's in the system's path such as/usr/bin/local/tarohsnap.sh - Setup a cron job to run daily
Example of archive names:
$hostname-2020.03.23-daily
$hostname-2020.03-March-monthly
$hostname-2020-annual
This script assumes that you have tarsnap installed, configured and running; it further assumes that a regular, unprivileged user will invoke it through crontab -e
I have also included my dotfile, tarsnaprc, which I create at $USER/.tarsnaprc as an example; I would replace $USER with your actual user name
This script is provided as-is; I don't warranty or guarantee that it will or will not delete your archives; modify it for your system(s)