Now that I have started working with RAW and DNG photographs, my workflow demands an efficient backup solution. I work on these files using Adobe Lighroom and Photoshop (I prefer them more than Gimp) on a VirtualBox WindowsXP. I have configured luckyBackup on my server to make backup of my RAW files every 12 hours to two independent locations – an internal backup only hard drive and a portable hard drive. luckyBackup emails me when the target directories are 25GB in size, so that I can then write it on to a Blue-Ray disk and lock it up safely.

a. Using crontab and rsync to backup subversion

Read my earlier post on crontab if you are not familiar with it. Someday I will write about rsync as well. But for now read this if you are new to rsync. I use the following code to backup the entire subversion repository to my backup directory.

rsync -av --delete --progress /source_directory/subversion/ /destination_directory/backups/subversion_backup/

I used crontab to schedule the above job to run at midnight every day. In case something happens to the original subeversion repository, it is easy to retrieve data from this backup – just copy it to the original location!

b. Using the backup script from COLLABNET (the subversion guys)

The next technique it to use the python based backup script from subversion called hot-backup.py. This script can be used to make a backup of the latest version of the subversion repository. I used the following code to download the latest version from COLLABNET website and install it on my system.

wget http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/tools/backup/hot-backup.py.in
mv hot-backup.py.in hot-backup.py

Once that is done, I had to make some configuration changes in the file. The following lines were changed

# Path to svnlook utility
svnlook = r"@SVN_BINDIR@/svnlook"
# Path to svnadmin utility
svnadmin = r"@SVN_BINDIR@/svnadmin"

to look like this

# Path to svnlook utility
svnlook = r"/usr/bin/svnlook"
# Path to svnadmin utility
svnadmin = r"/usr/bin/svnadmin"

The next step is to run the script check if everything is fine. I used the code below:

python hot-backup.py --archive-type=zip --num-backups=10 ~/source_directory/subversion_repository /destination_directory/subversion_backup/

The above code will make a hotcopy of the latest version of the subversion repository into the backup directory in zip format. A total of 10 backups will be maintained at a time, oldest one being deleted when new ones are added.

Once the backup was properly inspected I created a cron job to run this command at midnight every day.

c. Using the subversion ‘hotcopy’ command

This is a very simple technique as it uses the inbuilt ‘hotcopy’ command to backup the svn repository. Follow the command below to make a reliable incremental backup of your svn repositories.

svnadmin hotcopy /source_directory/subversion_repository /destination_directory/subversion_backup/

Create a cron job to schedule it.

Once you have your backup system in place, rest assured that your data are safe.