Arshive backup script

Overview

Arshive is a simple backup tool written in pure shell script. It is designed to perform periodic snapshots of any software data and rotate them to keep only the last N archives. Being written as a shell script, Arshive can be added to your crontab without any extra dependency.

How to use

Download latest release or clone repository, then place contents of the src directory anywhere in your file system e.g. in /opt/arshive/:

mkdir -p /opt/arshive &&
wget -qO - http://github.com/r3c/arshive/tarball/master/ |
tar xvz --strip-components=2 --wildcards -C /opt/arshive '*/src/'

Open and edit configuration file arshive.conf to declare one or more rule file(s) (see rules option) defining backup rules. Other options can be modified in this file to tweak the script behavior.

Open and edit rule file(s) (see sample arshive.rule file) to define how, when and for how long backup files should be created. Each rule file can contain one or more backup task declaration(s) to define how backup files should be created and maintained.

Here is a sample rule declaring a backup task named "web-data" creating a gzipped tar archive of everything within /var/www every two hour, and keeping the three most recent backups created that way:

web-data: cd /var/www && tar -czf {.tgz} *
  interval=7200
  keep=3

Run /your/directory/archive.sh -q every 5 minutes or so from your crontab. The "-q" flag will suppress any non-error output so the tool will take care of executing any due backup task and warn about anything that went bad.

Rule options

Following rule options can be used to tweak a backup task:

• interval=N: create a backup only if latest one is more than N seconds old or if no backup was successfully created yet. Default value is 86400 (1 day).
• keep=N: keep the last N successfully created backup files and delete older ones. Default value is 7.
• max_size=N: log a warning if size of created backup file is larger than N bytes.
• max_size_ratio=N: log a warning if size of created backup file is more than N times larger than previous backup size. N can be a decimal number, default value is 10.0.
• min_size=N: log a warning if size of created backup file is smaller than N bytes.
• min_size_ratio=N: log a warning if size of created backup file is less than N times smaller than previous backup size. N can be a decimal number, default value is 0.1.

Resource

• Contact: v.github.com+arshive [at] mirari [dot] fr
• License: license.md