How can I script making a backup of recently modified files in Bash?

Question

I have written this backup script that looks in a file and copies recent files into a folder.

#!/usr/bin/bash

# the number of days to do the backup for.
days=2;

# the files to backup.
location[0]='/opt/location'

# the location to copy the file to
copyLocation='/users/me/Backup/firstBackupScriptTry'

# preform the back up
for i in ${location[*]}
do
        find $i \! -name '*.class' -mtime -$days \! -type d -exec cp {} $copyLocation \;
done

It works but it is not that useful.

I would prefer the script to preserve the directory structure when it copies. Ie I would like it to do: cp -r from to but only copy the recent files.

Answer 1

A way would be to modify the file names that you get when running find. So in your loop, having a matched file name in $filename you shall:

1. In $filename, replace the leading $i with nothing
2. find out the $dir_name in the result of 1 by using dirname
3. append a trailing $copyLocation to $dirname and use it as argument for mkdir -p to create missing directories
4. copy $filename to "$copyLocation/$dirname"

I'm also going to suggest yet another file sync alternative: unison. It is easier to use than rsync.

Answer 2

rsync is made for this task. Check the examples page for usage.

Answer 3

A little off-topic perhaps, but you may want to take a look at BoxBackup. I used rsync scripts for a long time before moving to BoxBackup, and it really makes things easier - especially the "housekeeping"...