Sander’s Blog

Created a small script with ruby thats being executed by a cronjob to automatically backup a mailserver thats uses the Maildir format on Solaris.

The script backups the user home dir’s (This is where the mail is located) to a mounted NFS partition from the backup server. The script also should delete all backups older then 7 days. This is where I had a problem because I am not a real programmer “yet” and I didn’t want to search how to store all in a text file or in a db. So here is what I did (I know it’s a pretty ugly way of doing it, if anyone wants to give me a better code, please do so :- ) )

#!/opt/csw/bin/ruby
#Ruby Mail Backup
#Created by Sander on 05-06-2007

#
require 'date'

class Date
   def Date.now
      return Date.jd(DateTime.now.jd)
   end
end

dateBack = Date.now.to_s
dateDel1 = Date.now - 7
dateDel2 = Date.now - 50

#Deleting old backups (ugly workaround)
while dateDel2 < dateDel1
   delstr = dateDel2.to_s
    puts 'removing ' + delstr
    system('rm /mnt/backup/mail/home' + delstr +'.tar')
    dateDel2 = dateDel2 + 1
end

#Making backup of all home dir's
system('tar cf /mnt/backup/mail/home' + dateBack + '.tar /export/home/')