Website Backup With rsync

One thing that kept me from getting my blog back up for a while was the lack of a consistent backup strategy for the WordPress content and the website as a whole. Website backup should be easy, with these commands and the following script, it’s very easy.

This is just a starting point though, I have some ideas about backup that I plan to explore in future experiments.

Manual Runs

Quick backup command lines:

ssh user@host mysqldump --all-databases -p --result-file=db-backup-`date +%Y%m%d`.sql rsync -av --delete user@host:/remoteSource localDestination

1 2	ssh user@host mysqldump --all-databases -p --result-file=db-backup-`date +%Y%m%d`.sql rsync -av --delete user@host:/remoteSource localDestination

This creates a mirror image of the remote system directory tree and will delete local files that don’t exist remotely. Also, before doing the rsync it creates a dump of the MySQL database (useful for WordPressers) so you have that solidly backed up too, but you do have to punch in the password via the console. It’s a bad idea to pass the password directly on the command line, because it could be exposed to other users on a shared system.

Automation

This can be automated using a Bash script + Expect, of course. (and then stuck in a crontab)

Expected output from the script

=========================== Backing up MySQL database. =========================== spawn ssh someuser@somehost mysqldump --all-databases -p --result-file=db-backup-20100926.sql Enter password: somepassword =========================== Running rsync. rsync -av --delete someuser@somehost:/home/someuser website receiving incremental file list [...] sent 33643 bytes received 7361999 bytes 31946.62 bytes/sec total size is 3273865012 speedup is 442.67 =========================== Done.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

=========================== Backing up MySQL database. =========================== spawn ssh someuser@somehost mysqldump --all-databases -p --result-file=db-backup-20100926.sql Enter password: somepassword =========================== Running rsync. rsync -av --delete someuser@somehost:/home/someuser website receiving incremental file list [...] sent 33643 bytes  received 7361999 bytes  31946.62 bytes/sec total size is 3273865012  speedup is 442.67 =========================== Done.