My simple rsync backup scripts for Ubuntu 8.04 (also good for just about any Linux or BSD)

I'm no coding guru. And I feel like having to write my own scripts to get stuff done in Unix/Linux is all too much like reinventing the wheel.

Be that as it may, I hacked together these two short scripts to back up my /home files in Ubuntu 8.04 to an external USB drive. I put the scripts in /usr/local/bin and made them executable. I'm lazy enough that I used the Nautilus file manager to do this.

I run the scripts with sudo, meaning in my user account, I open a terminal and do this, entering my password when prompted:

$ sudo usb-backup

$ sudo usb-backup-exclude

For the second script, I created an "exclude file," which the script uses to exclude whichever directories or files I wish. In this case I use it to exclude the .gvfs directory, which breaks the script (and doesn't need to be copied anyway) and in this case to exclude my Thunderbird mail files, since they take so damn long to back up that doing it every day is something I'm not fond of. The beauty of the exclude file is that I can modify it while keeping the script the same.

I'm sure there are many of you who can do and have done a better job than this, but these two scripts appear to work, and that's what counts for me anyway.

There are some pounded-out notes for the scripts; feel free to remove them. They won't affect how the scripts work.

Here are the scripts:

usb-backup:

#! /bin/bash
# Use rsync to back up the /home folder to a 4 GB USB flash drive
# --delete allows for deletion of files on the backup that have been previously deleted on the source drive
# using --exclude to keep rsync from trying to back up ~/.gvfs
# Finally able to remove --ignore-errors now that .gvfs is excluded
rsync -av --delete --exclude 'home/steven/.gvfs' /home /media/disk/ubuntu
exit 0

usb-backup exclude:

#! /bin/bash
# Use rsync to back up the /home folder to a 4 GB USB flash drive
# --delete allows for deletion of files on the backup that have been previously deleted on the source drive
# setting up an exclude file to back up some directories and not others.
# Finally able to remove --ignore-errors now that .gvfs is excluded
rsync -av --delete --ignore-errors --exclude-from '/home/steven/Documents/shell_scripts/exclude' /home /media/disk/ubuntu
exit 0

And here is my "exclude" file which, as you can see from the script above, lives at /home/steven/Documents/shell_scripts/exclude:

/home/steven/.gvfs
/home/steven/.mozilla-thunderbird

.gvfs note: I've done similar scripts before in OpenBSD and Debian, and I don't believe either used the GNOME Virtual Filesystem, so there was no need to exclude ~/.gvfs when using rsync.