Documentation
NIGHTLY BACKUP
Preleminary Material for review
System Requirements
- Perl 5
- Crontab
- Somewhere to backup your files (buy a cheap
webaccount - sold here)
- Unix Style Operating System
- Telnet Access
Preliminaries
- Determine the path to PERL 5 on your web
server host. Note that some web hosting companies run both PERL 4 and PERL 5.
Make ABSOLUTELY sure you are not setting this up under PERL 4. Ask your
administrator if you are not sure.
- Download the tarfile for this program and
save it to your desktop.
- Unpack the tar archive on your desktop using a
program that unpacks UNIX TAR ARCHIVES. If you don't have such a program then download
WINZIP FREE from SHAREWARE.COM.
- After you have unpacked the TAR archive you
will have a collection of folders and files on your desktop. Now you have to do some
basic editing of each of these files (or at least some of them). Use a text editor
such as wordpad, notepad, BBEdit, simpletext, or teachtext to edit the files. These
are NOT WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS they are just simple TEXT files so don't save them as
word processor documents or save them with extentions such as .txt or they will NOT WORK.
Note that there may be a some files inside of folders which are "blank".
This is normal.
Preparing the CGI scripts
Define Path To PERL 5
The first step is to open up each and every
file that has a .cgi extention and edit line number one of each script. Each of the
cgi scripts is written in perl 5. For your scripts to run they must know where perl 5 is
installed on your web server. The path to perl 5 is defined to a cgi script in the first
line of the file. In each of the cgi scripts the first line of code looks something like
this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
If the path to perl 5 on your web server is
different from /usr/bin/perl you must edit the first line of each cgi script to reflect
the correct path. If the path to perl 5 is the same no changes are necessary. If you do
not know the path to perl 5 ask the webmaster or system administrator at your server site.
Configure the .cgi files
backup.cgi
Everything you need to do is right inside
here (see where it says "CONFIGURATION AREA")
- $myHost ="backupserverhostname";
- $myUser ="ftpusername";
- $myPass ="ftppassword";
- $mySourceDir
="/full/path/to/myrootdirectory/";
- $myDestDir
="/full/path/to/remotebackupserver/backupstoragedirectory/";
- $myHost is the HOSTNAME of the server you are
backing up to (EG: mybackupserver.com)
- $myUser is your USERNAME to login to that
server
- $myPass is your PASSWORD to login to that
server
- $mySourceDir is the FULL PATH to the directory
you want to backup. For example if your website is located inside of
/home/httpd/html/funkydomain.com/htdocs/ then you set
$mySourceDir="/home/httpd/html/funkydomain.com/htdocs/". Then everything
inside of this directory and its subsequent directories will be backed up to the remote
server
- $myDestDir is the FULL PATH to the destination
directory on the REMOTE SERVER you are backup up your files to. EG: If your
backup server directory is /www/users/webspace/dave/ then set
$myDestDir="/www/users/webspace/dave/"
Upload files and set permissions
Upload the backup.cgi script into the
directory you want to backup from. You can try uploading it into your cgi-bin but I
am not sure that will work. Best just upload into the same directory as
$mySourceDir. Set the permission on this file to 755. On your remote server
you should set the permission of your $myDesDir to 666 or 777 otherwise the server may not
allow you to backup anything.
Crontab
See the
tutorial for information on crontab