[aclug-L] Re: An idea -- any volunteers/helpers?

[Tom Hull <thull@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anne McCadden wrote:
> 
> One of the shell scripts that I would like to write is to tarball my
> important files once a week.  Maybe I could try that in Python also.
> ~Anne

The simplest way to do this is:

  cat LIST-OF-IMPORTANT-FILES | cpio -pdmu TARGET-DIRECTORY
  (cd TARGET_DIRECTORY; tar zcf ARCHIVE.tar.gz)

IOW, you copy the files to a staging directory, then tarball the staging
directory. The cat can be replaced by a find(1) to generate the file list
on the fly.

You can use rsync instead of cpio, which has some performance advantages
(only copies things that have changed, TARGET-DIRECTORY can be another
machine).

I originally wrote ftwalk to do redundant image selective backups over
nfs -- basically, I backed up 20 user machines onto a single backup
server, and ran the backups out of cron. ftwalk does timestamp-synching
to limit redundant copies, and makes it easy to write file heuristics.
A sample backup script is at:

  http://ftwalk.sourceforge.net/db.php?Topic=backup

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 *  Tom Hull * thull at kscable.com * http://www.tomhull.com/
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