Best practices while running a backup script as root.

[Eric Oyen]

as a former admin for alt-hacker.org, the policy was to create an inline backup directory owned by root. that would be where the preliminary backup would go. then, after about a week, that backup would be moved (in it's entirety) to an external drive called "JustInCase" all of this could be done with a simple bash script that used rsync to sync /Backup and /media/JustInCase. and yes, an exclusion was built in so that the primary backup wouldn't have a recursive backup of itself in the same directory. that turned out to get complicated, so /backup was moved to it's own external drive under /media/backup (owned by root).

The nice thing about this arrangement was that daily backups were available should the need arise to perform a reinstall. We never got to that point, fortunately. 

I am not sure that the newest flavors of Linux still use cron to manage timed jobs or not. All I know is that it just worked.

-eric
from the central office of the Technomage Guild, Systems retention Dept.

On Sep 21, 2017, at 7:26 PM, techlists at phpcoderusa.com wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have one PHP Script using the AWS S3 SDK that I have configured to backup each site on a vps.  I need to run it as root because of permission issues.  What is the best practice in this type of situation?
> 
> The server is running Ubuntu 16.04 and Plesk 17.5.
> 
> Should I place all the backup files in the /root directory or create another directly such as /backups owned by root?  I think I may have answered my own question with /backups owned by root.
> 
> Thank you for your guidance!!
> 
> Keith
> 
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