How can I backup a remote home directory to the cloud?

Question

I was looking to backup a home directory of mine to a cloud service such as Dropbox or Ubuntu One. It is my account on my university's servers. We recently had a file server failure but luckily they kept backups. I figured I shouldn't rely on this alone

Are there any utilities or services I can use versus a tarball that I upload directly?

I only have ssh access to my account and would like to sync it in this fashion.

Answer 1

I suggest you look into sparkleshare. It provides many of the features of dropbox or ubuntu one (and could integrate with them) and may work on generic UNIX. if it doesn't you might consider using vanilla git, instead.

Barring that, setting up a cron job that ssh's to the server on a schedule and downloads the files would be a viable option.

the script run by the cron job could be as simple as

ssh user@remote_host "tar -cf - ~" | bzip2 -zc | cat > ~/dropbox/$(date | sed 's/\ /\-/ig')-rhost_backup.tar

or in laymans terms: "using ssh, on remote system call: 'create an archive of %HOME_DIR% and dump it into the console' zip that with bzip2, and put that in a timestamped file in my dropbox (assuming your dropbox is at ~/dropbox).

Obviously, this makes some asumptions about your client system, etc. There are probably ways you could do this on windows, Mac should be very similar. There are also options for tar that will allow you to only store new versions of the files, etc.

Answer 2

Dropbox does offer a linux client here. You should be able to easily set up and run it since you have shell access.

However, as already suggested, simply syncing one directory to another is not as safe as you might think. If some of your files are accidentally deleted and then synchronisation runs your backup directory will also get emptied (I've never used Dropbox but I assume that this is how it works - if not, go ahead and use it)

Make sure you frequently manually verify that your backups are functioning.