Automating Linux File Backups using Rsync, Bash script and Cron

This is a script that copies directories from A to B. It does not compress directories into an archive, though you are welcome to adapt your script using snippets from this post.

The following is a bash script that mounts an external storage device for you (given the /dev/sda1 device name), copies files contained in a SOURCE directory to a DESTINATION directory. You can specify files to ignore in a separate rsync-ignore.txt file. Check out this post for the various ways you can exclude files with rsync.

#!/bin/bash
MOUNTDIR="/home/pi/ssd"
DEVICE="/dev/sda1"
SOURCE="/home/pi/documents/*"
DESTINATION="$MOUNTDIR/documents"
DIR=$(ls $SOURCE)

#echo "DIR: $DIR"

if [ -n "$DIR" ]; then

  if [ $(mount | grep -c $MOUNTDIR) != 1 ]
  then
    echo "Mounting $DEVICE"
    mount -t exfat $DEVICE $MOUNTDIR || exit 1
    echo "$MOUNTDIR is now mounted"
  else
    echo "$MOUNTDIR already mounted"
  fi
  echo "Commencing copy of files"
  rsync -ahvWi --exclude-from='rsync-ignore.txt' --progress $SOURCE $DESTINATION
  umount $MOUNTDIR
else
  echo "The directory is empty."
fi

You can find out where your device is mounted by running tail -f /var/log/syslog and checking the mount location log entry when you plug in your storage device. {: .notice–info}

rsync-ignore.txt Add and remove files types to exclude. THis file must be in the same directory as your bash script.

*.txt
*.jpeg
*.jpg
*.png
*.exe
*.msi
*.deb
*.gif

Automatic execution using Crontab

Type crontab -e, and paste this:

0 2 * * * /bin/bash /home/pi/rsync-script.sh

This will run your script daily at 2 am.