babak

A lightweight solution for designing and enforcing simple backup policies. It is essentially just a thin wrapper around rsync originally intended for cross-HPC backup purposes.

Requirements

The only dependency for babak is perl5. It is however highly recommended to use babak in combination with crontab. It is also assumed that you have properly set up SSH keys between your computers and the hosts. More details can be found below.

Installation

$ git clone https://github.com/ndejay/babak.git babak
$ cd babak
$ sudo cp babak /usr/local/bin
$ mkdir ~/.babak

Or alternatively, install it wherever you want and simply prepend the PATH environment variable with the path to the babak executable.

$ export PATH=/home/ndejay/bin
$ mkdir ~/.babak

Usage

First, define a set of hosts in ~/.babak/hosts.tsv. These are the hosts you are interested in transferring files to and from.

#HOST	USERNAME	HOSTNAME	PORT
raynor	jraynor	hostname1.lan	22
raynor2	jim.raynor	hostname2.net	9001

Second, in ~/.babak/manifest.tsv, define the backup policy you require. Each row is a separate source-destination operation in which at least one of the hosts involved must be the local machine.

In the simplest use case, if you wish to transfer all the files in your home directory to a remote server, write the following:

#SOURCE_PATH	DESTINATION_PATH	INCLUDE_PATTERN	EXCLUDE_PATTERN
local:/home/jim	raynor:/home/jraynor/backup	*	

Then, when you call babak, a shell script will be created in ~/.babak/script.sh which you can then add to your crontab.

$ babak
$ cat ~/.babak/script.sh
#!/usr/bin/env sh
rsync -azup --rsh 'ssh -p 22' \
  --include '*/' --include '*' \
  --exclude '' --prune-empty-dirs /home/jim jraynor@hostname1.lan:/home/jraynor/backup

Define the frequency at which you want these transfers to be completed by adding the one of the following entries to crontab -e:

# To run the transfer five minutes after midnight, every day
5 0 * * * $HOME/.babak/script.sh
# To run the transfer once a week on a Friday night at 11a
0 22 * * fri $HOME/.babak/script.sh

For more sophisticated uses of crontab, feel free to consult online documentation on the matter.

It is also recommended that you manually run (outside of crontab) the script produced by babak, just to make sure that you have properly set up your SSH keys and whatnot.

Advanced Features

If you wish to include all but a given a set of patterns, set INCLUDE_PATTERN to * and define EXCLUDE_PATTERN. For example, if you want to transfer all files except those starting with a . (dotfiles) from your home directory on the local machine to a remote host, follow this example:

#SOURCE_PATH	DESTINATION_PATH	INCLUDE_PATTERN	EXCLUDE_PATTERN
local:/home/jim	raynor:/home/jraynor/backup	*	*.**

If you wish to exclude all but a given set of patterns, set EXCLUDE_PATTERN to (blank) and define INCLUDE_PATTERN. For example, if you want to transfer all the files that start with a ., try the following:

#SOURCE_PATH	DESTINATION_PATH	INCLUDE_PATTERN	EXCLUDE_PATTERN
local:/home/jim	raynor:/home/jraynor/backup	.*	

It is also worth mentioning that all lines beginning with the # symbol are automatically ignored, so feel free to annotate your file definitions as you please. Also, these are tab-separated files.

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2016 Nicolas De Jay, Claudia Kleinman

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.