Backup RCS Directories Script

Source control is an essential part of a smart techies life. While the bigger version control systems are mostly useful to developers (SVK rocks) some of the simpler ones can often be found in the sysadmins toolkit.

A couple of companies I’ve worked for have been heavy users of RCS on their servers and while it’s made configuration safer (and easier to revert) its lack of a central repository is often an unaddressed weakness. The Backup RCS Directories Script scans a machine for any RCS directories and creates a gzipped tar archive from the results. This file can then be pulled off the machine as part of the standard backup routine.

The script has a couple of what I consider “nice to haves”, by default it’ll scan the entire file system looking for RCS directories. If this proves to be too heavy weight for you then create a file called ‘/etc/backuprcs_searchpath.conf’ and put the paths you want searched in it. And the script will stick to those. It also logs to syslog when it’s finished running so you can write a simple watcher to tell you if it doesn’t run each given period. Now you’ve just got to think about how to get each machines backups to a single place…