autobackup

Automatically create backups of a directory

Usage

Installation

Install latest from the GitHub repository:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/johnowhitaker/autobackup.git

or from pypi

$ pip install autobackup

How to use

autobackup src dest will make a copy of src (which can be a file or a directory) inside dir in a folder with the current date+time, and clean up any old backups based on the following rules:

  • The most recent 5 backups are kept
  • For each number of days in --max_ages (default is “2,14,60”) the oldest one below that age is kept.

This ensures that you have a few recent backups, one up to 2 days old, one up to 2 weeks old and one up to 2 months old.

To run this script hourly,

  1. Create a service file (e.g. /etc/systemd/system/backup.service):
[Unit]
Description=Hourly Backup Service

[Service]
ExecStart=autobackup /path/to/src /path/to/dest

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
  1. Create a timer file (e.g. /etc/systemd/system/backup.timer):
[Unit]
Description=Run Backup Service Hourly

[Timer]
OnCalendar=hourly

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target
  1. Enable and start the timer:
sudo systemctl enable backup.timer
sudo systemctl start backup.timer

It takes additional args from fastcore’s xtra.globtastic, for example you can ise -skip_folder_re '^\.\w' to skip folders with /. in the name, useful for skipping cache.