Effective Way To Backup Server On Remote

[HalestormXV]

I run a Dedicated Box. I have Multicraft installed on it and host a two servers off of the box. Currently Multicraft is set to back-up the server at night and zip it up nice nice.

Now this is a nice tidy thing to do however does not protect against Hardware failure which many server owner/administrators overlook. So my question is a rather simple one. I have a Dedicated Box that hosts my servers and I have a Hosting Plan with a webhost company that is wonderful. I have shelll access to both.

What I want to do is RSync my server from the Webhost with a cronjob. I know the RSync works as I have already tested it and duplicated old server files onto a backup directory in my webhost. However the issue I run into is that the backup can take quite some time. The maps are quite large. The problem with that is the save. If the map saves while RSync is running well than the backup files might get somewhat corrupted.

Any of you have a suggestion as to how I can have the MultiCraft Auto-Save turn itself off while the Cron job launches the RSync that executes from my Webhost and starts backing up the server and then once complete it turns it back on? Once again this problem mainly comes because I use Multicraft and am pulling files from the Dedicated Box to my Webhost. Ideally if I was not using Multicraft I could probably use the:

screen stuff <COMMAND HERE> method and make a .sh file to execute.

Suggestions and ideas or examples would be wonderful. Plowman if you read this I know you posted your RSync script for the hourly backup and that is fantastic. However, I can't think of a way to make that work with Multicraft since I don't know what screen the server uses, or if it even uses a screen.

[Random003]

Backup the zip files created by multicraft instead of the live minecraft server data.

[HalestormXV]

Sure I could do that but then I lose all the plugin data as well.

 

Although, technically I could rSync the plugin data also since really for a complete server restore you would only need the plugin folder and the World folder which gets zipped up via multicraft. And just have multicraft run backups more often. Everything else is just a matter of taking the mods in the modpack and reuploading.

That does make sense. However, do you know if rSync has a built in "white-list" feature, so it only takes certain files/folders. I know it has the --exclude option and I know you can generate an "exclude-list.txt" and have it read it but I was wondering if there was an alternative.

Edited October 12, 2015 by HalestormXV

[the taye]

what OS are you running the on the server and backup server?

Edited November 12, 2015 by the taye

[plowmanplow]

If space isn't a huge issue on the server you could rsync locally to another folder from the server files like a normal backup (saves off, etc), then use that local copy to rsync remotely so as not to tie the server up.