Backupify

Command Line Interface Application for getting periodic backups of specific targets.

Overview

Backupify provides an Interpreter for user to configure app settings via various commands and with the help of anacron, it gets periodic backups of user-chosen targets with user-configured settings.

Users can add/remove targets(paths), set/change backup destinations, set/change backup periods via commands defined for user. Users can display available commands and documentation by help command and documentation command respectively.

All the configurations for the app are saved in and loaded from backupifyConf.json file.

Backupify uses anacron for scheduling periodic backups. anacron is a program that executes commands periodically, with a frequency specified in days. Unlike cron it does not assume that the machine is running continuously (for more information visit manual page of anacron). Thanks to this feature of anacron, Backupify is able get backups periodically no matter machine runs or not. Since anacrontab needs to be configured only with sudo privileges, Backupify needs to be executed with sudo.

anacron is provided with backupScript and whenever anacron executes it, script reads the current configuration from backupifyConf.json file and compresses all targets with .tgz with timestamp into configured destination. Therefore it is VITAL for backupifyConf.json to exist and somehow if it gets deleted it will be reproduced with default values(for default values see manuals for commands with help) and all configuration will be discarded.

All backup and error logs will be reported into log file named backupify.log (anacron also logs activity to /var/log/syslog, so logs can also be seen from there).

Requirements

• Python3.6+
• anacron

Installation and Usage

Make sure that your system has specified requirements. Then clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/ysyesilyurt/Backupify/

You can either make scripts executable(Shebangs are defined no problems there) or run with python3, I prefer directly executing the script

chmod +x backupify.py
chmod +x backupScript.py

and run

sudo ./backupify.py

On first time run, Backupify will create backupifyConf.json with initial default configuration and an entry with to anacrontab will be appended regarding Backupify.

Contribution

Feel free to open an issue if you spot a bug. On the other hand for enhancements and other stuff, some issues for several reasons may remain open, if that is the case and your reasoning aren't listed in there feel free to open an issue about that too.

Always keep in mind that a backup may save you from a lot of nasty stuff, I learnt it from the hard way once, dont be like me 😊.