My own host and a backup script in python

Some time ago I decided that instead of sharing some space in a hosting service to have all my websites I was going to rent my own private server. I could had plugged one old machine to the network at home and save the money but if I have to pay every month a fee I’m sure I will make good use of it.

Now two years later the experience have proved to be great, I manage remotely my own Ubuntu machine (my knowledge in Unix systems have improved a lot), my own http server (nginx), I have services running (GIT, some node.js scripts) and I’m hosting several websites from some of my friends.

I’m using linode.com (great service) for a virtual machine of 256 MB of RAM (more than what I need), it costs me 20 Euros per month which I think is fair.

Thanks to that I’ve been able to code all kind of crazy ideas which it would had been impossible without my own remote machine, and I encourage to all the webmasters to give it a try one day to pass to a next level.
Something I miss when working in Unix is a good backup service, so today I made my first step into the backups system of my host.

I have made a little script to manage the backups, I wanted to do it in Javascript using Node.js but I end up using Python which has better modules for file handling.

Now when I am in some random folder I can call this command – backmeup name * – it copies all files from this folder matching the wildcard to the backups/$data/name folder. A simple way to have some backups of folders of great importance.

Here is the script:

#!/usr/bin/python

print "backing you up, bro"
backups_folder = "/home/tamat/backups/"

import os,sys,glob,datetime,getpass
from subprocess import call

wildcard = "*"

if len(sys.argv) < 2:
    print "sorry bro, I need a backup name"
    sys.exit(0)

backup_name = sys.argv[1]

files = sys.argv[2:]

if len(files) == 0:
    print "no files to backup, justsayin'"
    sys.exit(0)

now = datetime.datetime.now()
folder_name = backups_folder + now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d") + "/"

if not os.path.isdir(folder_name):
    os.mkdir( folder_name )

if backup_name != "" and backup_name != "this":
    folder_name = folder_name + backup_name + "/"

if not os.path.isdir(folder_name):
    print "creating folder, yo: " + backup_name
    os.mkdir( folder_name )

text_file = open(folder_name + "backup.log", "a")
text_file.write("saved from '"+os.getcwd()+"' by '"+getpass.getuser()+"' on " + now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M") + "\n")
text_file.close()

for file in files:
	print " + " + file
	call(["cp","-R",file, folder_name])

print "didit"