a crank’s progress

Nothing like the site of someone else’s mishap to focus attention on a problem.

The objectives of this are simple: back up the www directory on this machine in some easily usable form. I have a tape drive in this box, but tapes are not the easiest things to work with. So I elected to make a disk image that I can either burn to a CD or mount and inspect, as needed. The EXAMPLES section in the mkisofs man page gave me all the information I needed.

But I don’t necessarily want to burn a CD every time I back these files. So what I’ll do is create the image every night, copy to another system, thereby having two copies, the same as I could get if I burned to a CD but without the media cost.

#!/bin/sh
DATE=`date +%m-%d-%y`
cd /usr/local
/usr/local/bin/mkisofs -o /opt/backup/www-$DATE.iso -V backup-$DATE -R -J -hfs www
/sbin/mount_smbfs //me@backuphost/me /mnt/backuphost
cp /opt/backup/www-$DATE.iso /mnt/backuphost
cd /mnt/backuphost
cp www-$DATE.iso latest.iso
cd /opt/backup
/sbin/umount /mnt/backuphost
find /opt/backup -name "www*iso" -mtime +7 -print

Not too elegant, but I have tested it to make sure it creates mountable disk images and that’s what I’m after.

I’m going to take a leap of faith that I don’t lose a disk or the whole system on both systems I’m using for this. A logical extension of this would be to test that the mount operation (and the resulting copy) worked and substitute another place for the file to be stored.

Posted with ecto