Technical Tips
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Windows in this context is a registered trademark of Microsoft.
The Bash scripts below were based on a backup script written by Adam
Neat that you can find on the internet. The objective of the script is
to back up
Windows shares onto a Linux server running Samba. The original idea was
to have a master script calling a script to back up Windows machines
and
another script to back up Linux machines. The second script has never
been written as either rsync is used or the Linux clients run Samba and
are backed up using the win_backup script.
The master script is
net_backup.sh and the script for backing up Windows machines is
win_backup.sh.
There is a small file called backup_cfg.txt which contains the following lines :-
recurse
prompt
mget *
exit
This file contains the commands that are piped into smbclient. The
original idea was that they could be changed for each share but this
has never been used in practice.
The scripts are run from a user account called admin which can be any
account but preferably not root. A directory called backup is created
in the user's top level directory with subdirectories called current,
old and temp. The scripts move data from current to old, delete the
data from current and back up the new data into current. The master
script (net_backup.sh) is run as a cron job at 1 a.m. and therefore the
following morning there is the previous days data and the data from the
day before that available.
The scripts do not consider Saturday or Sunday to be special as they
are potentially days when some work maybe be done especially if a
project needs to be finished.
When a share is deleted or changed and a new directory name is created
in the master script then any directory names that are not in the
master script are not deleted. A decision was taken to manually delete
these.
The scripts were initally installed a part of a backup solution for a
design studio and have been working for nearly two years without a
problem. The Directors of the studio consider that the system paid for
itself in less than a year.
