simple-backup-dropbox

A very simple no cost recipe to store a backup on Dropbox using Git and Unix shell scripts.

• Create an account on Dropbox. Go to Dropbox Developers and create an App. Provide an App's name and select 'App folder' for Permission type. Last press Generate button to create a Generated access token and copy the generated token.

• Suppose you'd like to keep a backup of folder /var/www/my-site

• Create a folder under /var, which will hold a bare Git repository which will serve as a stage.

mkdir -p /var/repos
cd /var/respos
git init --bare /var/repos/my-site.git

• Initialize a Git repository on /var/www/my-site and add a remote to /var/repos/my-site.git

cd /var/www/my-site
git init
git remote add stage /var/repos/my-site.git
git add . -A
git commit -am 'Init commit'
git push stage master

• Create a Shell script.

cd ~ && echo > backup.sh && chmod +x backup.sh

• Edit the shell script with your favourite editor. The script creates a tar from the bare Git repo, makes splits of 50Mbytes and push them on Dropbox along with a log.

ACCESS_TOKEN="DROPBOX_GENERATED_ACCESS_TOKEN"

# commit changes on source folder, push to stage repo
cd /var/www/my-site
git add . -A
git commit -am "`date +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M'`"
git push stage master

# create temp folder
mkdir -p /tmp/my-site/splits
cd /tmp/my-site
echo > log.txt
rm my-site.tar
rm ./splits/my-site.tar.*

# create archive of stage repo, make splits
tar -cvf my-site.tar  /var/repos/my-site.git
split --bytes=50M my-site.tar ./splits/my-site.tar.

# push splits to Dropbox
cd /tmp/my-site/splits

for f in my-site.tar.*; do
  CMD=$(curl -X POST https://content.dropboxapi.com/2/files/upload \
    --header "Authorization: Bearer $ACCESS_TOKEN" \
    --header "Dropbox-API-Arg: {\"path\": \"/splits/$f\",\"mode\": \"overwrite\",\"autorename\": false,\"mute\": true}" \
    --header "Content-Type: application/octet-stream" \
    --data-binary @$f 2>&1)
  echo $CMD >> /tmp/my-site/log.txt
done

curl -X POST https://content.dropboxapi.com/2/files/upload \
    --header "Authorization: Bearer $ACCESS_TOKEN" \
    --header "Dropbox-API-Arg: {\"path\": \"/log.txt\",\"mode\": \"overwrite\",\"autorename\": false,\"mute\": true}" \
    --header "Content-Type: application/octet-stream" \
    --data-binary @/tmp/my-site/log.txt 2>&1

• Run your script! You may set up Cron to run this script any time of the day, weekday, etc..

• You may recover from backup from 2 sources. Either from the bare Git repo

cd /var/www
git clone /var/repos/my-site.git

or from Dropbox

cat my-site.tar.* > my-site.tar
cd /var/repos
tar xvf my-site.tar
cd /var/www
git clone /var/repos/my-site.git

TODO:

• make backup.sh more dynamic, using script parameters