In my latest post I did mention the new setup and since I am a litte narcissistic I did tweet this post right away. And a good friend and fellow software craftsman Mark Paluch (@mp911de) instantly claimed the question about data protection (aka backup).

Over the years I did try out several simple backup systems (eg. backup-manager), but it never felt right.

Therefore I started to create some very simple script and by now I am still using it:

#!/bin/bash

SSHFS_MOUNT_SOURCE=sshfs-server.domain:/
SSHFS_MOUNT_TARGET=/mnt/local-backup-mount
BACKUP_PATH="${SSHFS_MOUNT_TARGET}/backup/"
BASE_PATH=/basepath-to-be-used
PUB_KEY_EMAIL=email@some.domain

sshfs "${SSHFS_MOUNT_SOURCE}" "${SSHFS_MOUNT_TARGET}"

cutoff=$(date -d '7 days ago' +"%s")

for BACKUP_ITEM in {all,sub,paths}; do
 TMP_TARGET="/tmp-storage/backup-${BACKUP_ITEM}-$(date +"%Y-%m-%d").tar.gz"
 GPG_TARGET="${TMP_TARGET}.gpg"
 tar -czf "${TMP_TARGET}" "${BASE_PATH}/${BACKUP_ITEM}"
 gpg -e -r "${PUB_KEY_EMAIL}" -o "${GPG_TARGET}" "${TMP_TARGET}"
 cp "${GPG_TARGET}" "${BACKUP_PATH}"

 cutoff=$(date -d '7 days ago' +"%s")

 find "${BACKUP_PATH}" -type f | while read fileName; do
 fileDate=$(echo $fileName | sed 's/.*-\([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]\).*/\1/')
 fileDateInSeconds=$(date -d "${fileDate}" +%s)
 if [ ${fileDateInSeconds} -lt ${cutoff} ]; then
 rm ${fileName}
 fi
 done

 rm "${TMP_TARGET}" "${GPG_TARGET}"
done

umount "${SSHFS_MOUNT_TARGET}"

It works out quite nicely – but this is far from being a enterprise backup solution 😉