My Technophilic Musings

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The question that we will be answering today is: Q2: Cron? Using tar, making up the script file is enough command line for me. Isn’t there an easy way? Cron is a tool that can schedule any kind of tasks for you, and here we are using it to run our backup script automatically, so that we can concentrate on blogging. Now, most of us are phobic of anything that has anything to do with command line. And we already have enough of command line stuff in this series. So, you can breathe a sigh of relief for a few moments because atleast the cron part can be made Web/GUI based for you (The command line method for cron was given in the first part). The details that I’m going to present here are relevant for cpanel but it might differ for you (very minor to very major) as your webhost might have a different panel for you (e.g. vdeck) or even your cpanel might look very different. But the basic concept remains the same and with a bit of common sense, you can apply this concept to your site easily.

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Quote of the day: “Every war is the result of a difference of opinion. Maybe the biggest questions can only be answered by the greatest of conflicts.” - JC Denton

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: attachment, automate site backup, automate website backup, automated backup, automatically e-mail site backup, backup, cpanel, cron, cron job, crontab, e-mail limit, gui, site backup, tar, vdeck, web, Webhosting, webhosting tip, website backup, webspace limit

My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog | Follow me on Twitter
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Last time, I had told you about how to reduce the backup size. Well, this is a short note further developing on the approaches discussed there. Basically, telling tar to backup only those files which have changed. For this, Linux has a command “find” which I am very fond of. You can give it a option “-newer” followed by a f”filename” and it will return the names of the files that are newer than filename.

So, the command given above will find all the files that have changed since you took the backup “backup_x.tgz” and store those filenames and paths into “files.txt”. The “-type f” option makes sure that only filenames are listed and not directory names, because tar creates a lot of issues when presented with directory names (Explore yourself about this).

Now, all we have to do is give this “files.txt” to tar as an input to tell it which files to archive.

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Quote of the day: Morpheus: Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: attachment, automate site backup, automate website backup, automated backup, automatically e-mail site backup, backup, cron, crontab, e-mail limit, find, incremental backup, mtime, newer, site backup, tar, Webhosting, webhosting tip, website backup, webspace limit

My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog | Follow me on Twitter
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Last week I had written a short guide on “Automating Website Backups”. I received some good comments/suggestions about it from Jasvinder through e-mail about other aspects that should be addressed. So, thought of doing a few follow ups to that post. This is done in more of a FAQ fashion, so as to answer some of the questions that may arise after reading the first post. Each post will answer one of the questions listed below in detail

Questions to be answered:

Q1: I have strict limits on webspace/email attachment etc. Can anything be done to reduce the backup size?

Q2: Cron? Using tar, making up the script file is enough command line for me. Isn’t there an easy way?

Q3: Well, backup is all hunky-dory. Now, how do I restore?

Want the answers? Read on.

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Quote of the day: "If there are any questions, direct them to that brick wall over there." -- Network President

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: attachment, automate site backup, automate website backup, automated backup, automatically e-mail site backup, backup, cron, crontab, e-mail limit, site backup, tar, Webhosting, webhosting tip, website backup, webspace limit

My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog | Follow me on Twitter
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What can go wrong with your wonderfully running website / blog? Everything..

Your online abode is so difficult to keep secured. It can get hacked, you may install something wrong, a wrong configuration can wreak havoc, the server hard disk might crash, natural calamities, and what not. Your best option to secure yourself against all this is summarized in just one word “BACKUP”.

Now, a backup involves two most important things: “Database Backup” and “Files Backup”. Most webhosts give you the options to back these up for you but with a few catches:

• You can backup but only through your control panel manually. No automation/scheduling of backups.
• Automated Backing up is not free
• Automated Backing up is free but restoring is not as they give you the backed up data only on request.

There are many plugins available for most CMS and blogging sw for backing up databases. But what about the files? Especially if you have more than one sites on one hosting account. Well, here I’ll tell you how to automate file backups in three simple steps.

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Quote of the day: "I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?"

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: automate site backup, automate website backup, automated backup, automatically e-mail site backup, backup, cron, crontab, site backup, tar, Webhosting, webhosting tip, website backup