Automate backup with python script

Automate Backup of a Folder

You may have an important folder in your Server that your may want to backup regularly. In this blog, I will explain how your can automate the backup with a simple python script. I have used Ubuntu Linux in this blog. You can use this method in any flavor of Linux and in Windows as well. For windows most of the steps change but the logic remains same.

Step 1:

Download python script pyCompry.py from https://sourceforge.net/projects/pycompry/

Step2:

You will need Python 3.3. Install Python3 (if it is not installed already) on the server. Type below command in the shell.

apt-get install python3

To confirm if the python is installed correctly, just type "python3 --version" command on the CLI. It should return the python version number.

Step3:

Now locate the folder that you would like to backup regularly. Ensue that you have necessary permission on source and destination path.

python ~/pyCompry.py -h

(This will show the help)

Run below command to manually execute the backup (please change -i and -o with actual paths)

python3 ~/pyCompry.py -i /var/somesourcepath/ -o /mnt/somemountedremotepath/

Step4:

Now you may use crontab to schedule this script to automate the backup. Type:

sudo crontab -e

Now in the crontab, enter the below line. Edit the line to correct the timing you want to schedule and the actual paths.

45 04 * * *python3 ~/pyCompry.py -i /var/somesourcepath/ -o /mnt/somemountedremotepath/

The above line will configure crontab to schedule the script to run at 00:30 every night. So you may want to edit the line with whatever time you want it to run.

You may mount a remote path of your DR server on this server and schedule to take backup. Since this script compress the data, it might help you save some time on the transfer over slow networks.

For more details, refer to WiKi
https://sourceforge.net/p/pycompry/wiki/Home/