If you want to save money or have a copy of your company’s data in different location, you can use cheap USB disks for backing up data on remote location (e.g., data center).

1, Buy a Extenral Hard Drive, install Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) on your local computer

2, Generating your private/public key pair.

Open a Cygwin window, type:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Do not enter password (press enter to skip) in the following steps:

Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/Alex/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/Alex/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/Alex/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
16:d7:e0:71:74:a9:4a:d7:e0:72:42:f9:79:01:86:76 Alex@MyDellLaptop

3. Now you have your private key in ~/.ssh/id_rsa and public key in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. Keep your private key as top secret and upload public key to your remote server:

ssh remoteserver "mkdir .ssh; chmod 600 .ssh"
scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remoteserver:.ssh/authorized_keys2
alex@MyDellLaptop:~$ scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remoteserver:.ssh/authorized_keys2
alex@MyDellLaptop's password:
id_rsa.pub 100% 225 0.0KB/s 00:00
alex@MyDellLaptop:~$

4. Write a simple shell script backup.sh for backup:

#!/bin/bash
ssh alex@remoteserver "cd /home; tar cvf labsupplymall.tar labsupplymall"
ssh alex@remoteserver "cd /home; gzip labsupplymall.tar"
scp alex@remoteserver:/home/labsupplymall.tar.gz /cygdrive/f/labsupplymall_backup/.
ssh alex@remoteserver "cd /home; rm -rf labsupplymall.tar.gz"


You may want to use dos2unix to remove ^M

$ dos2unix backup.sh

5. Create a cron job:

crontab -e

This will start backup job every Sunday at 1 AM.

0 1 * * 0 /home/Alex/backup.sh

Save the file, and sit back and relax.

Technorati : Cron, Extenral Hard Drive, Linux, Remote Backup, SCP, SSH, USB Disk, cygwin, tar