Automated tar and dump incremental backup script for FBSD

Izhar Firdaus Follow Support Jan 18, 2008 · 1 min read

Automated tar and dump incremental backup script for FBSD

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The recent gmirror failure on Gambit caused us to switch to automated dump and tar instead.

Our requirement was like this: Full backup on Mondays (around 3-5am) with daily incremental backups relative to the Monday backup. Whenever a full backup is being performed, the previous backups must not be overwritten until the full backup is done.

And the results::

inigo-tarball-backups.sh - an incremental tar backup script using FreeBSD's Tar

inigo-disk-dumps.sh - an incremental live dump script using FreeBSD's Dump - now, I wish Linux's Dump have live dump support.

gnu-tar-incremental-backup.sh - an incremental tar backup script using GNU's Tar - I wrote this before the FreeBSD's Tar script on my Fedora laptop, but was surprised that FreeBSD's Tar doesn't have --listed-incremental option (-_-)".

For the scheduling, I just use cron.

Do inform me if you have suggestions to improve the scripts or if you found any risky bug it in.

update: Anybody knows how to properly tar a live directory? (eg: /var/log/).

Written by Izhar Firdaus Follow Support

I'm a system architect, data engineer and developer advocate with passion in Free / Open Source software, entrepreneurship, community building, education and martial art. I take enjoyment in bridging and bringing together different FOSS technologies to help businesses and organizations utilize IT infrastructure to aid and optimize their business and organizational process.