Backing up your computer while you're sleeping

There is a lot of things that our computer can do while we’re sleeping, beside the obvious shutting it down to save energy. I like to schedule backup to my external HD and to Ubuntu One. I like to upload my important documents to Ubuntu so that I can download them anywhere in case I need them. Since I am studying I can’t afford to loose my research papers and assignments.

Backing up my documents

At the time of writing this blog, Ubuntu does not support sharing folders or files outside ‘~/ubuntuone’.So I created a shell script that zip my documents and copy them to Ubuntu One folder on an hourly basis. A zip command can be :

zip -r '/home/zainul/Ubuntu One/academic.zip'  '/home/zainul/Documents/Victoria'

This will create a zip file under ‘/home/zainul/Ubuntu One/academic.zip’ that contains any file under ‘/home/zainul/Documents/Victoria’.Ubuntu will automatically upload new or modified file from my Ubuntu One folder to the web.

Scheduling the backup

I created a shell script that back up and copy my files to Ubuntu One folder:

# Backup my university research paper to Ubuntu One
zip -r '/home/zainul/Ubuntu One/academic.zip'  '/home/zainul/Documents/Victoria'

I save this script as ‘backup.sh’ and grant execute rights by typing ‘chmod u+rx backup.sh’ into the console. I use a task scheduler UI to execute this script on an hourly basis.

Backing Up My Laptop.

I use SBackUp to back up my Ubuntu to my external HD.

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