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broke-backup.sh was born out of necessity—sometimes you cannot afford to backup all of your data. The first thing that gets excluded from a backup is large, replaceable data such as Linux ISOs. ☠️

This script is meant to give a little bit of security to that replaceable data by recording the directory contents using a basic Unix command: tree. It will output these directory trees to a user-defined backup folder, and email monthly archived backups.

Familiarity with tree is not needed; this script takes care of the most common use-case. The core concept is that it recursively lists directory contents, and can be output to a text file. For advanced users, it has many custom options that can be found at its man page.

Disclaimer: Despite 'backup' being in the name, this will not protect your data. It will save a text-only list of files and directories, which amounts to being a disaster recovery assistant. If/when disaster strikes you might lose your files, but you will know exactly what you lost so you can replace the data.

Example Tree Output

This truncated example is a Calibre library folder set to a depth of 2 (Show the children of the Comics folder and their sub-folders; Alan Moore and Andrew Donkin). In this script, this text is output to Comics.txt

/path/to/Comics
├── Alan Moore
│   └── Watchmen (166)
├── Andrew Donkin
│   ├── Artemis Fowl (223)
│   ├── The Arctic Incident (224)
│   ├── The Eternity Code (226)
│   └── The Opal Deception (225)
...

Example Backup Folder

This is my personal backup folder, that has been running since October 2020, as of August 2021. It backs up 6 locations—14 TiB of 40k files—into a 4 MiB Backup directory. A single archived backup is ~60 KiB.

It keeps 14 days of live (uncompressed) backups, and archives monthly backups indefinitely.

broke-backup-output.png

Usage

Dependencies:

  • tree

  • mutt - must have a working configuration

  • xz-utils

Configuration

There are 7 basic config settings:

  • recipient_email - Recipient email address

  • email_subject - The subject for sent emails

  • monthly_email_body - The body of the monthly email

  • forced_email_body - The body of the forced email

  • output_dir - Output directory for backups

  • SOURCES - List of directories to backup

  • DEPTH - Depth settings for the above sources

Advanced Tree Settings

To accommodate advanced uses, specifying custom tree options per source is supported. Setting use_custom=TRUE will override the DEPTH settings of the basic config with CUSTOM_OPTIONS

Scheduling

broke-backup.sh is designed on a daily job schedule. It will also happily run less often, or purely on a manual basis.

Suggested config is to set a cron job to run the script daily. My personal config runs every day at 00:25

Logic Overview

The script has been written to be self-documented and should be fairly easy to follow but it's overall flow is:

  • if today's backup already exists:
    • send a forced backup email—You may want this for two reasons:
      • You've just started using broke-backup.sh and want an off-location backup before the 1st of the month rolls around
      • Testing your configuration
  • else run today's backup to the user-defined backup folder
    • if today is the 1st of the month;
      • send a monthly backup email; and
      • Archive a copy into the /Archives sub-directory as .tar.xz
  • Delete backups older than 2 weeks

Current Limitations

  • Two sources cannot have the same name

    • /example/media/path and /example/cloud/path will both output to path.txt—the second backup will overwrite the first

  • File modification times of the backup will be fudged

    • When a backup job is finished, the directory will be backdated to 00:00 of the current day so the cleanup logic works consistently.