On Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:11:37 -0500, Chris Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I wrote a trivial backup script that does the following: > > If tonight is the first day of the month: > > save last month's archive > do a full backup of the system > > else: > > save last night's differential backup > back up all changes relative to the current month's full backup > > endif > > I wrote this in bash and although it's worked w/o a glitch for the last > couple of months .. I'm not comfortable with .. "the look & feel of it".
This sounds like a job for cron(8) -- it's designed for exactly these things: doing things based on calendar events. I assume you already run your backups from cron rather than staying up every night to do your stuff, so what about changing this in your crontab 00 1 * * * full_or_incremental_backup to this? 00 1 1 * * backup --full 00 1 2-31 * * backup --incremental (Or maybe two different scripts suit you better.) That way you needn't implement your own logic for deciding when to do a full backup. (You still need a way to find the latest full backup, though.) /Jorgen -- // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@ Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu \X/ snipabacken.se> R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list