Setting Up Automated Server Backups

A robust backup strategy protects your data against accidental deletion, hardware failure, and ransomware. This guide covers a practical daily backup setup.

What to Back Up

• Web files: /var/www/
• Databases: use mysqldump
• Configuration files: /etc/nginx/, /etc/apache2/, /etc/
• Application data and uploads

Create a Backup Script

nano /root/backup.sh

#!/bin/bash
DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
BACKUP_DIR="/backup/$DATE"
mkdir -p "$BACKUP_DIR"

# Back up web files
rsync -az /var/www/ "$BACKUP_DIR/www/"

# Back up all databases
mysqldump --all-databases -u root -pYOUR_DB_PASSWORD > "$BACKUP_DIR/all-databases.sql"

# Compress the backup
tar -czf "/backup/backup-$DATE.tar.gz" "$BACKUP_DIR"
rm -rf "$BACKUP_DIR"

# Remove backups older than 7 days
find /backup/ -name "backup-*.tar.gz" -mtime +7 -delete

echo "Backup complete: /backup/backup-$DATE.tar.gz"

chmod +x /root/backup.sh

Schedule the Backup with Cron

crontab -e
# Run nightly at 3 AM:
0 3 * * * /root/backup.sh >> /var/log/backup.log 2>&1

Test the Script

/root/backup.sh

Offsite Backups with rclone

rclone can sync backups to Backblaze B2, AWS S3, Google Drive, and more:

apt install rclone -y
rclone config   # Set up your cloud storage provider
# Then add to backup.sh:
rclone copy /backup/ remote:my-server-backups/