Hedge Backup Script

hedge verb 4. "minimize loss or risk; "diversify your financial portfolio to hedge price risks"; "hedge your bets"

WordNet 2.1, 2005 Princeton University

What?

Hedge is a simple, easy-to-use backup script. It makes a compressed, encrypted tarball, either full or differential-by-date and sends it to one or more remote hosts via ssh. It sends you a report, and cleans up old backup images.

Hedge was originally designed under Linux, and is based around a handful of common linux tools: bash, ssh, tar, gzip, openssl, mailx, logger, date, egrep, sed and md5sum

Why?

The network backup tool must be one of the most reinvented wheels of all time, right? Yes, but I have tried a lot of alternatives in the last five years, and none were exactly what I wanted without being elaborate and arcane.

Hedge aims to be simple, obvious, and easy to hack on.

How?

There's nothing magic to it. In fact, that's the point. Chances are that if Hedge is for you, you will already have done all the things that Hedge does on the command-line before. Hedge:

• backs up filesystems with tar
• compresses its archives with gzip
• encrypts its archives with openssl
• pipes the archive to remote storage using ssh
• uses simple Y-M-D date-stamps to housekeep its archives
• is just a shell script. Hopefully a fairly legible one.

If you want to install hedge, just follow the directions in the README.

Who?

Hedge is for anyone literate in typical UN*X/Linux tools with a networked computer to back up.

So far I'm the only author. Mail me if you want to tinker with Hedge yourself, and I'll add your name here.

CSS kludged from bluerobot.com  ::  Hedge image used under CC from Michaele's photos