This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Michael Neumann. Original Post: Making backups with RBackup Feed Title: Mike's Weblog Feed URL: http://www.ntecs.de/blog-old/index.rss?cat=ruby&count=7 Feed Description: Blogging about Ruby and other interesting stuff. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Michael Neumann Latest Posts From Mike's Weblog

It creates CPIO archives (new portable format, w/o CRC), and compresses them on the fly if desired. Note that it's all pure Ruby, so that you don't have to install the cpio program.

You can download the sources here. Make sure that you get both files cpio.rb and rbackup.rb. Of course it comes without any warranties. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Below is a short example how to use RBackup:

  require 'rbackup'
  require 'enumerator'
  require 'find'

  BACKUP_DIR = '/backup/%s'

  Collection.new('projects', BACKUP_DIR) {
    Find.to_enum(:find, '/data/projects').to_a
  }.backup_monthly

  Collection.new('maildirs-home', BACKUP_DIR) {
    files = []
    Dir.glob('/data/home/*/Maildir') do |md|
      Find.find(md) {|path|
        if File.directory?(path) && %w(.Spam .Trash).include?(File.basename(path))
          Find.prune # skip those directories
        else
          files << path
        end
      }
    end
    files
  }.backup_monthly

  Collection.new('rcs', BACKUP_DIR) {
    Dir['/**/RCS'].select {|path| File.directory?(path)}.
    collect {|path| Find.to_enum(:find, path).to_a}.flatten
  }.backup_weekly

  Collection.new('etc', BACKUP_DIR) {
    Find.to_enum(:find, '/etc').to_a +
    Find.to_enum(:find, '/usr/local/etc').to_a
  }.backup_weekly

Call this script daily (via crontab or /etc/periodic/daily) to create daily incremental backups. When backup_monthly is specified, it will create a full backup every first day of the month, or in the case of backup_weekly, every first day of the week.

Note that I'm using Find.find most of the time in the example above instead of Dir.glob, as the latter does not include dotfiles by default.

Why another backup program?

I wrote RBackup, as I wanted to be able to perform an arbitrary number of incremental backups. This wasn't possible with flexbackup or at least I didn't knew how. Furthermore, I wanted to be able to specify exactly which files to backup and which not. For this purpose, Ruby is very powerful.