strftime backups to Amazon S3

Blue Skies
1

after some experimentation, I succeeded in getting dates and times appended to backup filenames - but only when the backup format is a single archive file. It’s currently not possible to append dates and times to the (new) one file per server backup format.

It would be very handy if I could append dates and times to individual mydomain.com.tar.gz files.

As a side note, I have a question about the single archive file format: viewing my backup file on Amazon S3, I can see no .tar.gz file extension - is this file not compressed? Come to think of it, it’s a lot bigger than all the smaller mydomain.com.tar.gz files added together (those smaller files I can’t get the dates and times appended to the filenames).

cheers
Rob

2
It would be very handy if I could append dates and times to individual mydomain.com.tar.gz files.

Can’t you put them into a directory named after the date? That’s what I do on our server, e.g., for backup destination:

/backup/%Y%m%d

And then I get:

/backup/20090101/virtualmin.com.tar.gz

Oh, but now I see it sounds like you’re using Amazon S3 buckets, rather than traditional directories…so that might be an issue. :wink:

So, file a "Request" ticket. Jamie will be able to give the most useful feedback on whether this could be added.

3

Hi Joe! Any idea if this was ever added? I don’t see the request ticket anywhere.

4

Hi Kato,

I think strftime substitutions will work when sending backups to Amazon’s S3 service.

If you find that’s not the case, or you run into problems, let us know :slight_smile:

-Eric

5

I gave it a shot and got this error: Failed to save scheduled backup : Invalid characters in S3 filename

It might be noteworthy that I have “one file per server” selected.

Sorry, I realized this is a bit vague; I’ll add some more details in a few mins.

6

Okay, so I figured out how to make this work with S3. Essentially, it will create directories using the strftime parms, but only one level deep.

So the example above (and how I’ve always done mine) of “backups/%Y-%m-%d” will not work (because / is an invalid character).

However, if I set it up as follows, it creates one backup per server, in a yyyy-mm-dd directory:

File under bucket: %Y-%m-%d
[x] do strftime style substitutions

Backup format [x] one per server
[x] create destination directory