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Pretty Good Hat

Tuning up my Backups

Some instability with my web host the past week or so prompted me to think about the state of the backups of my online spaces. I spent some time today getting backup scripts working on the host, and found that, based on the file dates, the last time I worked on this was about a year ago. Yay, me. After troubleshooting them for a little while I now have some functional backup scripts to tar up my web directories and my databases. Then I set about burning most of the morning getting my Synology to grab the backup from the host.1

Because I’ll forget and no doubt have to do this again, I took a few notes:

With passwordless login to the Synology, and from the Synology to my host and backup server working, finally, I could test executing my backup scripts from the shell on the Synology. Lo and behold, it works! In the “Scheduled Tasks” section of the Synology control panel, I set up these scripts to execute the remote backup and periodically download the resulting files:

Runs twice weekly:

/usr/bin/ssh kaizen 'cd ~/backup-scripts; ./backup-mysql-databases; ./backup-files'

Runs weekly:

/usr/syno/bin/rsync -av --progress strongspace:arlington-backup/ /volume1/Archive/backup/kaizengarden

Why not run these daily? Because these sites don’t actually change all that much. Downloading the full backup weekly is plenty, if not outright overkill, since the most frequently-changed part of the site is all markdown files stored in dropbox and synced when I re-publish. Why not schedule the backup to run via cron on my host? Because this works, and I was already in the Synology shell experimenting, so it was easy to not have to log in to the web server. (And last time I worked on the backup scripts at the host, I remember some kind of problem with running them via cron; some kind path or environment thing interacting with tar, I think. So this got around that, too.)

I did the same for my stuff over at tilde.club, too. This didn’t require any backup script, since I just have a single directory there; I just rsync the whole relatively small thing into a backup folder on the synology here.


  1. It’s not actually directly from the host. My scripts pack up the tar archives and rsync them to my backup location at Strongspace. ↩︎