Help needed for anacrontab script

[PhilippeH]

Hello,
I use my Mint (20.2 Cinnamon) computer to work on local websites, and have an Apache webserver with PHP and MySQL running. I need to backup local databases and have come up with the following script in /etc/anacrontab file:

Code: Select all

1 15 purgetmp find /var/www/mysql_backup -type f -mtime +7 -delete > /dev/null
1 15 mysql_backup mkdir -p /var/www/mysql_backup ; mysqldump -u root -psesame --all-databases | /bin/gzip -9 > /var/www/mysql_backup/`date '+%F'`.databases.sql.gz ; rm -f /var/www/mysql_backup/`date '+%F' --date '1 week ago'`.databases.sql.gz

This works fine, however, it has two inconveniences that I hope you could help me correct:

1) the first line seems to me redundant with the second, as it seems to me that both delete the backups older than 7 days (?)
2) if the computer is turned off for several days, the older backups get deleted when they are more than 7 days old. Therefore, if the computer is off for more than 7 days, all backups get deleted and only one is kept after running the script.

I would prefer to always keep the last 7 backups, regardless of their age

Could one of you knowledgeable people give me indications on how to achieve my goal? Thank you very much

[it-place]

Hi PhilippeH,

if you don't want the files to be deleted after 7 days but want to keep 7 versions I'll suggest to rotate the files instead. Move the files like this:

remove mysql_backup.7
mysql_backup.6 => mysql_backup.7
mysql_backup.5 => mysql_backup.6
[...]
mysql_backup.1 => mysql_backup.2
mysql_backup => mysql_backup.1
create mysql_backup

I've done this in an own backup script using a "while, do, done" loop in BASH.

Regards - Olli

[PhilippeH]

Thanks for this sound advice, I will try.