Subversion backup dump - just need something very simple

Question

I have this command that I'm told will do a full backup of Subversion (tell me if that's not true):

svnadmin dump /shared/svnrepos | gzip /shared/backup/snvfull.svn.gz

I'm not a Linux person. I just simply want it to run nightly at 7pm and overwrite the file nightly. It takes quite a while to run though (around 4-5 hours creating around a 28GB file)

Can someone please tell me how to set it up as a cron job in Linux as the root user? (It's Gentoo if that matters)

If it's easier to run a Windows task from the "backup server" just let me know how to create that task to remote in via SSH and run that command as the root user.

Thank you!

P.S. if there's a better/easier way to backup a large SVN, please let me know...I know nothing about Subversion but I'm still stuck dealing with it.

Answer 1

Your command will work.

Create a dump script such as svndump.sh

#!/bin/bash date=`date +%Y-%m-%d` svnadmin dump /shared/svnrepos | gzip /shared/backup/snvfull_$date.svn.gz 

Edit Crontab file crontab -e add

0 19 * * * root /path-to-svn-dump/svndump.sh file 

every day at 7pm this will dump your file

On windows create a bat file such as

for /F "tokens=6,7,8 delims=/ " %%i in ('echo.^|date^|find "current" ') do set today=%%k%%j%%i set backupdate=%today% cd "C:\backups\svn" svnadmin dump "C:\svn_repository\your_repo" > "C:\backups\svn\yourbackup_%backupdate%.svn" 

Add this file to scheduled jobs for desired time to run.

Answer 2

svnadmin dump should work but you can also use svnandmin hotcopy. I use the following script from cron to back up multiple repositories, compress them and keep the last few days:

#!/bin/sh # # Backup-svn: Back up each repository under /svn using 'svnadmin hotcopy'. svn_dir=/my/svn/directory backup_dir=/my/svn/backup/directory date_stamp=`date +%Y-%m-%d` repo_list=`ls -d $svn_dir/*/conf | sed -e "s:^$svn_dir/::" -e 's:/conf$::'` keep_days=5 renice 5 -p $$ > /dev/null 2>&1 ionice -c 3 -p $$ > /dev/null 2>&1 cd $backup_dir for repo in $repo_list ; do dest=$repo-$date_stamp dest_tmp=$backup_dir/$dest rm -rf $dest_tmp date +"%F %T: Starting hotcopy for $repo" svnadmin hotcopy $svn_dir/$repo $dest_tmp date +"%F %T: Archiving $repo" tar -czf $dest.tar.gz $dest_tmp du -sh $dest.tar.gz $dest_tmp date +"%F %T: Removing $repo" rm -rf $dest_tmp & for old_backup in `ls $repo-2*.tar.gz | sort -r | sed "1,${keep_days}d"` ; do date +"%F %T: Removing $old_backup" rm $old_backup done done