Backing up Der Flounder Revisited

Nine years ago, I wrote a post on how I backup this blog. Overall, the reasons I’m backing up haven’t changed:

• I like this blog and don’t want to see it or its data disappear because of data loss.
• WordPress.com’s free hosting doesn’t provide me with an automated backup method.

To create the backups, I make a nightly mirror using HTTrack. As time has passed and host machines were replaced, I’ve moved the backup host a few times. For the last move, I decided for budgetary reasons to move off of using Macs and onto a Raspberry Pi. For those wanting to know more, please see below the jump.

The current backup host is a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B running Raspbian Buster, which is closely based on Debian Linux. To set up an automated backup using HTTrack, I used the following procedure:

1. Installed HTTrack for Debian by running the commands below with root privileges:

apt-get update
apt-get install webhttrack

2. Creating a backup directory in the pi user’s home directory by running the following command:

mkdir -p /home/pi/derflounder_backup

2. Set up the following script as /usr/local/bin/der_flounder_backup.sh

#!/bin/bash

backupDirectoryPath="/home/pi/derflounder_backup"

/usr/bin/httrack "https://derflounder.wordpress.com/" -O "$backupDirectoryPath" "+https://derflounder.wordpress.com/*" "+https://derflounder.files.wordpress.com/*" -v

For the script itself:

• I’m first specifying the starting point. In this case, it is https://derflounder.wordpress.com/.
• We can specify where the mirrored data will go using the -O flag (note that $backupDirectoryPath is a path I defined earlier on in my script. In this case, the data is being stored in /home/pi/derflounder_backup.
• The quotations where I have “+” with something are urls from which it is allowed to download, and process. If you do not specify any, it will only download from the domain you specify.
• The “-v” flag specifies httrack to run in verbose mode.

4. Set up a cron job like the one shown below to run the backup script. In my case, I set it up in the pi user’s crontab to run nightly at 2:00 AM:

0 2 * * *  /usr/local/bin/der_flounder_backup.sh

Meanwhile, like the Macs who did this job before it, I’m also backing up the Raspberry Pi that the backup is stored on, so that I have multiple copies of the backed-up data available.