Cron pattern to copy over a USB drive

sky_watcher

Hi everyone, I see in the topic from above that is possible to insert a USB drive into the MangoES box and create a cron pattern that will copy automatically the files from the backup directory over the USB drive.

I'm quite novice in this area and if anybody can help me with more information about how I can do this and how I can run this cron pattern it will be very helpful.

Thank you!

MattFox

Use rsync:
https://linux.die.net/man/1/rsync
Rsync can also delete the source files after they have been copied over if needed, however mango should do that for you if you've got a rolling backups of N days.
Also take note you are better off making a bash script so you can run some checks. IE if the file system exists (the usb I mean)
Make sure the bash script starts with

#!/bin/bash

Use https://crontab-generator.org/ to generate the cron pattern you'd like to use.
Finally:
Look at fstab for automatically mounting the USB file system and giving it a friendly name under mount if applicable - not necessary though
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab

Read up on that first and make sure everything lines up before restarting the mango , it can throw a spanner in the works if Linux doesn't like the fstab configuration.

Once you've had a read I can assist further

Fox

phildunlap

Hi sky_watcher,

You shouldn't have to worry about mounting the USB drive with fstab as Fox suggested - V3 Mango ES units have usbmount installed to facilitate the USB Utilities actions. It will mount the first USB stick plugged in at /media/usb0

After that, your choices are

Set Mango to backup directly to the USB drive instead of to the /opt/mango/backup folder. This is in the system settings
Set up a cron pattern as Fox suggested and add that to a crontab either via crontab -e to invoke the script or simply add the script /etc/cron.daily/ (and then you don't need to generate the cron pattern but you have less control).
Set a schedule in Mango and use event handlers to copy / move files as necessary.

MattFox

Thanks Phil!
Wasn't entirely sure on if fstab was applicable but felt it was good enough to mention for how a linux fs works at least.

Fox

phildunlap

True, it's applicable on any other Linux system - and you provided adequate notice that it's a bad place to make a mistake!

sky_watcher

@phildunlap Hi Phil! Thanks for your advice.

When I try to give that path to the backup directory I get an error:

phildunlap

Did you see over SSH or Webmin if the device is actually mounted there? It could also be a permissions issue, if Mango is running as a non-root user but that mounting point is owned by root. Check with ls -l /media/

sky_watcher

@phildunlap On Mango I'm logged in with admin.

The mounting point is owned by root.

phildunlap

Try chown'ing that to the 'mango' user like,

sudo chown -R mango:mango /media/usb*

sky_watcher

@phildunlap I don't have permission to change the owner for /media/usb0/. Could be a problem because the USB is mounted there?

phildunlap

I wouldn't think so. Did you sudo? What response did you get from running the command?

phildunlap

I edited the command, as there was no reason to give the mango user access to /media/boot/

sky_watcher

This is the command and the error:

phildunlap

It could be caused by the filesystem type not supporting Linux permissions. Perhaps you could reformat the drive to an ext3 or ext4 filesystem?

sky_watcher

@phildunlap I get same error in mango and the drive is formatted as ext4, is mounted and the mango user has wrights to write on the usb0 folder.

MattFox

Hi guys, just gonna give a suggestion, cd into /media/usb0/
then do the chown again

sudo chown mango:mango . -R

then enter the

ls -la

That should give us all info for that directory to start. Skywatcher, assuming you are using putty if you highlight the text, you can then paste into here with code tags.

You should be able to create a file just with touch file
no sudo required

phildunlap

Also ensure the mango user has at least read permissions to /media

sky_watcher

@mattfox said in Cron pattern to copy over a USB drive:

total 24
drwxr-xr-x  3 mango mango  4096 Aug 29 14:54 .
drwxr-xr-x 12 root  root   4096 Aug 29 11:45 ..
drwx------  2 mango mango 16384 Aug 29 14:54 lost+found
root@mangoES3324:/media/usb0$touch file
root@mangoES3324:/media/usb0$la -ls
total 16
 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root  root      0 Aug 29 15:22 file
16 drwx------ 2 mango mango 16384 Aug 29 14:54 lost+found

MattFox

You're logged in as root, you need to be the mango user if you want to test effectively, also please use those code tags, it makes a lot easier to read.

Edit: Thanks!
Ok dir permissions look good. Try doing the touch newfile as mango, if you can do that, there should be no issues with mango creating files. I'll check my server for you soon if wanted to compare configs.

Fox

sky_watcher

@mattfox

mango@mangoES3324:/media/usb0$ls
file  lost+found
mango@mangoES3324:/media/usb0$touch newfile
mango@mangoES3324:/media/usb0$ls
file  lost+found  newfile
mango@mangoES3324:/media/usb0$ls -la
total 24
drwxr-xr-x  3 mango mango  4096 Aug 29 15:43 .
drwxr-xr-x 12 root  root   4096 Aug 29 11:45 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root  root      0 Aug 29 15:22 file
drwx------  2 mango mango 16384 Aug 29 14:54 lost+found
-rw-r--r--  1 mango mango     0 Aug 29 15:43 newfile