The Blog Thing

First, I’ve renamed my Vbackup project to Yabs.
Vbackup proved to be an already existing project for a backup solution, so I decided to look for a more unique name.
The new name didn’t turn up in Google, and that’s enough for me

From now on, vbackup will be known as yabs, which is an acronym for “Yet Another Backup Script”. How original

Together with the renaming, I’ve released a new version, numbered as 1.1.0. Here are the most important updates:

# Revision history
#
# version 1.1.0 -
#       – Renamed the program from vbackup to yabs. Vbackup was an existing project by someone else.
#       – Changed the logic for logging erros. You can now use a log file, syslog, both or none.
#       – Added some extra checks for consistency in user defined variables.
#       – Added the backup destination to the exclution list. No more backing up the backups.
#       – Added the -xdev switch logic to “find”. Gives the possibility to exclude other file systems or not.
#         I’ve set this to YES by default, so things like /proc, /sys, /dev, etc will not be included in the backups.

You can download the new version here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~vincentv/yabs-1.1.0.tgz
Again, make sure to save this as a .tgz file. Some browsers get this wrong.

A long time ago I started writing a Bash script to create backups for my systems.
Over time this script has developed into something I and some collegues and friends find useful, so I decided to publish it and see if more people are interrested in using it. If so, I’ll try and maintain it.
The program is released under the GNU GPL v3.

My backup regime consists of making a full backup once a week and then a daily differential backup since the time of the full backup. This script obviously concentrates on that. If you need incremental backups, adapt the script to your needs.
The script was written for CentOS 4 and 5 systems, and most likely will run without a hitch on all Red Hat derivates like Fedora.

The main features of this script are:

• Option to exclude files and directories from the backup by specifying exclusions as regular expressions. Sound difficult? Isn’t! See the included example. Google “perlretut” for excellent documentation on learning regular expressions.
• Options to set the location of the backup files, temporary files, etc.
• Options to have backup files and/or log files stored uncompressed or compressed with gzip or bzip2.
• Option to have sha1 checksums generated and stored to check file integrity afterwards.
• Options to have custom commands executed right before and after the backup. You could use these to rsync files to an off site location, mail backup logs, whatever. See the script for some simple examples.

All options are documented withtin the script file. Open it, browse through them and change them before using the script!

Let me know when you find serious errors. Suggestions are always welcome. How to contact me is on the end of the README file. I may not get back to every single email, but I’ll try

You may download the script here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~vincentv/vbackup-1.0.0.tgz
Make sure you save the script as a .tgz file. Some browsers get the extension wrong.

Happy backupping