How to automate the following task?

Question

Daily i wanna copy some files from a remote system and i have to put all those files in on a folder on that date say .Is it possible to automate this task? What we do presently is we log on to the remote machine through VNC and we go to the preferred location and copy those files and put it on a folder.If some day we forget this we wont be able to take records for that day coz the files will be overwritten.So i would like to automate this task, is it possible? Can someone help me please.Thanks in adavance..

Note: The remote system runs Windows XP Professional

Answer 1

You can take the Windows-being-useless issue out of the equation very simply: create a share and mount it on your Linux machine (with smbfs or CIFS). It's fairly simple so I'll leave that between you and the Ubuntu Help Pages.

From there it's fairly simple:

1. Create a script. Call it something logical, put it somewhere where you won't trip over it or accidentally move it. chmod +x it too.

2. Get your script to do what you want. I'll assume you mounted your writable Windows share as /mnt/win (mount it under /mnt/ if you don't want it show up in nautilus) and that you want these directories stored in ~/daily-backups/.

   #!/bin/bash
   
   SRC="/mnt/win"
   OUT="~/daily-backups"
   DATE=$(date '+%Y-%m-%d')
   
   NEWDIR="$OUT/$DATE"
   
   # make the new directory for today and cd into it
   mkdir -p "$NEWDIR"
   cd "$NEWDIR"
   
   cp -R "$SRC/*" . # could use rsync
   

3. cron it up. Assuming your script is called ~/daily-backups/do-backups. Type crontab -e and in the editor add a new line like this:

   0 22 * * * ~/daily-backups/do-backups
   

   And that will run your script every day at 10pm. Obviously you might want to tune that to a more sentible time but I wouldn't leave it until midnight or the datestamp might get confusing.

Answer 2

If you can put Cygwing on that Windows box then rsync (over ssh) and cron would be the standard solution.

It's not easy.

Search for "backups with rsync", this would come up first: http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/ - a really good resource. Explains how to setup backups with snapshots (timestamps).