Linux Desktop Hacks

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Chapter 9, Administration and Automation

#83 Make Network Backups

HACK

perform a series of network backups that simply copy files from one

machine on the network to another.

Simple Single-Shot Backup

If you want to do a simple full backup of a directory, you can do it with a

single command by using secure copy (

scp). This little tool lets you copy a

number of files from one computer to another in a secure encrypted form.

One of the major benefits of

scp is that you can copy files across the Inter-

net; you are not limited just to computers on your local network. To use

scp,

you need to have the Secure SHell (SSH) daemon running on the machine

you are copying to and have the

scp program (which is part of the SSH pack-

age) on the computer you are copying from.

To get started, you can copy a directory full of work from your machine

martin to a machine called simon (if your hostnames are not resolvable, use

their IP addresses). You can do this with the following command:

foo@martin:~$ scp -r importantwork simon:/home/alan

This command uses scp to recursively (-r) copy the files within the

importantwork directory to the host

simon and into the /home/alan direc-

tory. Once you have entered the command, you see a status bar for each file

as it is transferred. This gives you a visual indication of the copy’s progress.

Elaborate Backups Using rsync

Using scp for backing up a configuration has a few inherent ...