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