Unattended Linux Wakeup, Backup, Shutdown (part 5)

“At last we come to the end of this series and put all the
pieces together, and put our fabulous unattended automatic backup
scheme to work. You need never lift a finger except to run periodic
checks to make sure everything is working correctly.

“Here’s how it all fits together:

1. Since I have a router that runs 24×7, that runs a cron job
that wakes up the backup server. The wakeup command can be run from
any computer on the same subnet as the server.
2. Each client PC has its own backup script, also started by
cron.
3. Server and clients all have their own cron jobs to shut them
off.

“This is all very simple by ace scripter standards. Shutdowns
are timed, rather than some elegant thingy that knows when the
backup is finished and then shuts down. I give my backups an hour
to run, which is about 55 minutes more than they need. With Gigabit
Ethernet and SATA 3.0 even giant batches of photos or videos move
pretty quickly. If you’re not familiar with rsync, it is my backup
tool of choice because it is extremely efficient. After your first
backup it transfers only changes, and can copy files from your
backup server without any special tools, just your usual favorite
Linux copy commands.”

Complete
Story