Rclone Backup

This is a simple script that runs rclone to backup a folder to Google Drive. The script supports versioning of backups. Files updated or deleted are stored in a separate backup directory with timestamp for archiving.

Blog

I posted a blog on how this script was developed and some explanations on the rclone commands. You can read the blog here.

Setup

1. Download the files backup.sh which is a bash script that runs rclone sync and the rclone-ignore.txt which is a list of exclude files that will be ignored in the backup.
2. Update backup.sh to add folders to backup.
3. Update rclone-ignore.txt to add or remove files or path to be ignored.
4. Place both files in a folder of your choice.
5. Enable execute permission on the script.

chmod u+x backup.sh

1. Schedule the script on crontab.

e.g. to run every 6am and 6pm daily

0 6,18 * * * /your-install-path/backup.sh

1. An out folder will be created in the install path that contains the logs files.

Housekeeping

The log files in the out folder will eventually grow. The backup folder containing the deleted/updated files in Google Drive will also grow over time. For now, the script does not support cleaning them automatically, delete these files regularly.