Friday, March 18, 2016

Painless Linux Cloud Backups From The Command Line

\ A few nights ago I was talking with my Dad about backup strategies and hit me: I don't have a method in place for backing up photos on my Linux box. On Windows, I use both Carbonite and Google Photo. But on Linux, I've got nothing. Well that's not good. I needed a simple solution, and I needed one fast.

I know that there are number of fancy sync options for Linux, but what I really wanted was something Unix'y. In fact, what I really wanted was rsync pushing to Google Drive. And turns out, you can get essentially this using rclone. I grabbed the binary (a yum install would have been sweet, but doesn't appear to be available) and typed:

 rclone config

I answered a few questions, and authenticated my Google Drive account using OAuth. And then syncing was as simple as running the command:

  rclone sync ~/Pictures personal_gdrive:Backups/Pictures

The command churned away, and 27 Gigs later, finished. I put the above command in cron and now I've got my backup solution in place.

rclone is definitely going into the toolbox for future use as it elegantly bridges the modern cloud with the old school Unix world.

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