Automatic_Back-Ups/README.md

This script checks if changes happened to a given list of files, and if so, it’ll store them into a next version as back up.

Setup

Install git.
Create a folder that should act as your automatic archive.
Open that folder with your terminal and execute git init
Create a file in the folder called “.gitignore” and put the following in it:

backup_routine.sh
backup_filelist.txt
log.txt

Create the files “backup_routine.sh” and “backup_filelist.txt” in this folder.
Copy the code from “backup_routine.sh” in this repository into yours.
Put the complete filepaths to the files you want to automatically be versioned into “backup_filelist.txt”.
Now use git add * and git commit -m "initial commit"
You’re done setting up your automatic archive.

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Automation

Make it so that “sh backup_routine.sh” gets called automatically. I recommend setting up a cron job, for example by executing EDITOR=nano crontab -e and writing the following into crontab:

0,15,30,45 * * * * cd ~/Automatic\ Git\ Versioned\ Backups && sh backup_routine.sh

This will run the script every 15 minutes.

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Restoration

Use

git log -- filename.ext

to view all the past versions.
Copy the commit-id of the version you wish to restore.
To recreate a past version, use

git show commit-id:filename.ext > path/to/restoration/filename.restored.ext

For example: git show 8f1dc7362dd5f6781ccf9ccc5a9cfdccb57ed709:ToDo.xlsx >> ToDo.restored.xlsx