Kingrimursel/BaWaB

A script written in Bash to automatically backup as many directories as often as you want. It logs everything to a file and is hence easily comprehensible.

BaWaB

This is a shell script written in bash 4.4.19 which automatically updates as many directories as often as you want. Every execution will be logged in BaWaB.log and and thus easily comprehensible. Out of the box the script sets up a new cron job so the backup runs every hour, but the frequency easily be changed by manipulating the cron job.

Installation

In order to install BaWaB, you first need to install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install notify-send
sudo apt-get install realpath

Once those packages are installed, you can go on installing the actual script.

Therefore, navigate into the downloaded folder BaWaB and execute install.sh from there::

cd path/to/BaWaB/
bash install.sh

If everything went right, you should see a green message telling you to now set at least one variable. The one variable you'll have to set is backup_elements, which tells the script the elements(s) that should actually be backed up. To do that, navigate into BaWaB.sh, search for backup_elements and fill the array (and remove the examples).

Personalize the script.

But that doesn't mean you must be finished.

• By default, the backups get safed in the Backups folder, but you can change that as well by manipulating the destination_folder variable in BaWab.sh.
• Also the script ensures that only n backups are kept as the same time. By default n is set to seven, so one week, but you can change the saving_limit variable in BaWaB.sh.
• As already mentioned, when the program gets installed it automatically sets up a cron job to run once an hour. That can be changed.

Potentially occuring problems.

There could occur some problems in ** combination with cronjob and notify-send**. You get a norification every time something gets backed up, and in order to do so notify-send needs two enviroment variables: DISPLAY and DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS. When cron runs the script, it doesn't know the variables by default so they get passed to cron by the script (BaWaB.sh). I set them matching for Ubuntu 18.04, if you dont get a notification you might want to set those matching yours.

Also the script automatically sets the SHELL variable and the PATH variable for cron. Since the shell needs to be bash i guess that one will stay, but in case something is not working with cron you might try to change PATH.