Incremental backup of Drupal using rsync to iBackup.com

Rsync is a remote file sync protocol written by the same people who brought us the Samba project.

Rsync copies files from one location to another keeping both copies in sync. This means that files changed on location A will be copied to B and vice versa.

Rsync is also used by ibackup.com is a commerical service for online backup and online storage.

One of the nice features they have is the ability to use rsync to backup your files to the space allocated to you.

This article explains how to write a script to backup Drupal to ibackup via rsync. This is not limited to ibackup, and is applicable to rsync capable servers under your direct control.

The strategy is to inform rsync of the location to be backed up, as well as a special location to hold database dumps. Rsycn then copies the entire database dump, and any files that changed on the server (e.g. image files users created as attachments to node, or new modules you installed).

Here is the script. Save it to /usr/local/bin/ibackup.sh or a location of your choice.

#!/bin/sh
# Directory that holds the database backup
DB_BACKUP_DIR=/home/backup/dbdump
# Directories to rsync (Change these)
DIRS_TO_RSYNC="/var/www/test /var/www/production $DB_BACKUP_DIR"
# Names and passwords (Change these)
DB_NAME=production
DB_USER=prod
DB_PASS=mypassword
RSYNC_USER=myuser
RSYNC_PASSWORD=mypass
SUFFIX=`date +%y%m%d`
DB_ARCHIVE=$DB_BACKUP_DIR/$DB_NAME.$SUFFIX.sql.bz2
# Create the dump file, compressed by bzip2
mysqldump --opt -u$DB_USER -p$DB_PASS $DB_NAME | bzip2 -c > $DB_ARCHIVE
# Export the rsync password
export RSYNC_PASSWORD
# Run the rsync
for DIR in $DIRS_TO_RSYNC
do
rsync -rvzt $DIR $RSYNC_USER@rsync.ibackup.com::ibackup
done 

You need to change the passwords in the appropriate place. I have some shell scripts that extract the user, database name and password for Drupal's database from settings.php automatically, but did not have time to integrate them into this script yet.

Then in cron, add the following to run this backup every day at 1:20 am

1 20 * * * /usr/local/bin/ibackup.sh 

There you have it. You will backup a copy of the entire database every day, and any changed files as well.

You will get an email informing you of whether the backup was successful or if there are errors.

Resources

• Robert Douglass also posted about another approach using FTP: How to backup your web server.