BackerUpper was designed to be a very simple to setup and maintain backup system.  I wanted a backup program that was easy to configure, flexible in what was and wasn't backed up, and would also perform incremental backups.  I couldn't find what I was looking for so I created my own.

Features:

• Easy configuration of directories and files that should be backed-up
• Easy configuration of directories and files that shouldn't be backed-up
• Monthly full backup
• Daily incremental backups
• Can have an unlimited number of backup configuration setups
  
• Uses the common zip program to create the backup files (optionally uses bzip2)
• Can use the zip update feature to maintain a single incremental file for the month
  

Programs need by BackerUpper to operate properly:

• zip
• egrep
• tr  (part of textutils)
• find (part of findutils)
  

Setup:

        BackerUpper is easily setup by changing it's configuration file backerupper.conf.  This file is normally located in the /etc directory. Each portion of the configuration file determines how BackerUpper operates.  There are only 3 configuration settings and 4 sections that you need to change in order to tell the program what files to backup.

BACKUP_DIR=/tmp

        This line tells BackerUpper where to create the backup file.  The backup file will be named by the month, day, and year that the backup relates to.  A full backup will be indicated as such.  For example, Feb.21.2002.full.zip, is a full backup created on 2/21/2002.  A backup file named Feb.22.2002.zip is an incremental backup that contains files changed on 2/22/2002.  Default is pointing to /tmp, but if you want to make a special directory just for backups set it to that (e.g. /backups).
 

TMP_DIR=/tmp

        This line tells BackerUpper what directory it should use for it's temporary files.  If you don't have any other users accessing your machine then the /tmp directory is fine.  If it's a machine that other users can access and you don't want them to see your directory structure and files, this should then point to a directory that only root can access.  In addition, if you use multiple configuration files, then you should have different TMP_DIR for each configuration.
 

FINAL_CMD=scp %s machine2:/backups/machine1

        This line is a final command that BackerUpper should run once the backup has been created.  The  %s is the name of the backup file.  This command can be any shell command or a script file if you'd like to do more complex post backup processing.  The example above copies the backup across a network to another machine using scp.  If you want to make a duplicate copy of the backup onto another hard drive that's mount at /drive2, you could give this configuration:

FINAL_CMD=cp %s /drive2

        You should not put the directory indicated in BACKUP_DIR here, just use %s and BackerUpper will know where the backup file is located.
 

INCLUDE DIRECTORIES

        Lines after this heading should be directories you want backed-up. Not only will this directory be backed-up, but every directory lower then this one will be backed up too. So if you put in:

/home

        Any files in the /home directory will be backed-up and every users directory and sub-directories will be backed-up too.
 

INCLUDE FILES

        Lines after this heading are single files that you want included in the backup. This allows you to backup a single file in any directory without backing-up every file in that directory. For instance, to backup the configuration file for BackerUpper you could put in:

/etc/backerupper.conf

        This would backup the configuration file without backing-up everything in /etc.
 

EXCLUDE DIRECTORIES

        Lines after this heading should be directories that you DO NOT want backed-up. Not only will this directory not be backed-up, but any sub-directories under this one will not be backed-up. This is used with the INCLUDE DIRECTORIES section so you can just backup sets of a directory heirarchy.

        For example, I want to backup all the users directories, so I would put in /home in the INCLUDE DIRECTORIES section, but I don't want to backup netscape's cache directory, so I could add:

/home/user1/.netscape/cache
 

EXCLUDE FILES

        Lines after this heading are single files that you DO NOT want backed-up. This can be used to exclude a single file from a directory that you have indicated for backup in the INCLUDE DIRECTORIES section.
 

        You can put comments in the configuration file by placing a # at the beginning of the line.  Also blank lines are recognized and skipped by BackerUpper when reading in the configuration file.

        Here's a sample configuration file:

BACKUP_DIR=/tmp 
TMP_DIR=/tmp
FINAL_CMD=scp %s machine2:/backups/machine1

INCLUDE DIRECTORIES
/home/user1

INCLUDE FILES
/etc/backerupper.conf

EXCLUDE DIRECTORIES
/home/user1/.netscape/cache

EXCLUDE FILES
/home/user1/huge.mp3

END

        The configuration file, backerupper.conf, should be placed in /etc - this is where backerupper will look for the file.  If you'd like to place the file somewhere else or have multiple configurations, then just use the -d command-line option.  

Command-Line Options:

-h, -H, -?    Prints out a quick help screen

-F            Force a full backup to be performed

-I            Force an incremental backup to be performed all the time, even for 1st of the month

-i            Force an incremental backup of files that changed today

-d conf_dir            Directory where configuration files are located

        The -d conf_dir command-line option lets you have multiple backup configuration settings.  The conf_dir should be the directory where your configuration files are located.  Normally this defaults to /etc, but by using -d you can create multiple configurations.  Just create the directory where you want to put the configuration file and then create the backerupper.conf configuration file.

-t M/D/YYYY      Fake last time a backup occurred

        Used to create a backerupper.last file in the conf_dir directory.  See Advanced Features for info in it's use.

        NOTE:  All command-line options MUST be specified separately!  You can't group them, they each must contain the dash '-' sign.   For example, you can't do: backerupper -di /etc/backups,  instead use:  backerupper -i -d /etc/backups.

Quick Start:

        BackerUpper is meant to be run as a cron job.  Here are the steps to quickly start using BackerUpper.
 

        1.        Decide what you want backed-up and modify the file backerupper.conf

        2.        Run the shell script backerupper.start which will perform the following steps:

                    1.    Move the executable backerupper to /usr/local/bin
                    2.    Move the configuration file backerupper.conf to /etc
                    3.    It will execute this command:

    echo "10 0 * * * /usr/local/bin/backerupper 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null" >> /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root

                        This will add the appropriate statement to root's crontab file so that cron will run BackerUpper at 10 minutes after midnight every night.

                    4.    And lastly, it will execute this command:

         echo root >> /var/spool/cron/crontabs/cron.update

                     cron.update is the file cron looks for when there are changes to the crontab files.  This will tell cron that there are changes to the crontab file.
 

        After this everything should work without you have to do anything.  If your cron files are located elsewhere you might have to modify the script (This script works for SlackWare Linux).  At 10 minutes after midnight BackerUpper will start up and realize that it hasn't been run before.  It will therefore perform a full backup of the directories and files you indicated.  Then every night after this it will perform an incremental backup of just those files that changed the day before.  10 minutes after the midnight of the 1st of every month BackerUpper will perform a full backup again.

        If you ever want to stop BackerUpper then edit the /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root  file and remove the line for BackerUpper.  Once that's done execute this at the command line:

echo root >> /var/spool/cron/crontabs/cron.update
 

Detailed Setup:

        The best way to setup BackerUpper is to first determine what directories/files you want to backup.  Use the du command to determine if there are any sub-directories containing lots of data that you didn't expect to be backed-up so that you can exclude them.  Sometimes "hidden" directories (directories that start with a dot ".") will contain lots of data that you really aren't interested in backing-up.  For example, Netscape's cache is inside of the .netscape directory in your home directory.

        Once you've decided on what to backup and configured backerupper.conf then go ahead and run the backerupper.start script.  Once this is done then BackerUpper will start operating that night, but it's best to run backerupper for the first time from the command-line.  The reason I suggest this is there might still be some strange files that BackerUpper can't handle.  For example, the program dosemu sets up some pipe files in a hidden .dosemu directory.  Zip can't zip these files up and when it tries it just "hangs" and doesn't do anything else.  When BackerUpper is ran from the command-line you can see if the program completes normally or stops on certain files.  If it exits properly then it shouldn't have any problems running from cron. 

Advanced Features:

USE_BZIP2

USE_ZIP_UPDATE