I run an in-house server for myself and some friends and I got tired of manually running backups, by logging in, stopping the server, making the tar.gz file and then moving it around, so I threw together this simple script. It relies upon an active screen session for the server and a named window called Server to be present, but other than that it should be pretty straight forward how to works.
#!/bin/sh # change the argument for -S to whatever screen -ls says is the right value # this allows us to target the running screen sessions so if there is a server # reboot then this script must be updated (until I work out the code to make # all that happen automatically screen -S 436.minecraft -p Server -X stuff '/say Preparing for Server Backup /say please get to a safe area soon (2 minutes) ' sleep 2m # this should be 2m when testing is done screen -S 436.minecraft -p Server -X stuff '/say commencing backup process now /say this should take about 15 minutes max /save-all /say server is going down NOW! /stop ' cd mc-server tar -cf "mc-backup-"`date +%Y_%m_%d`".tar" world* gzip "mc-backup-"`date +%Y_%m_%d`".tar" mv "mc-backup-"`date +%Y_%m_%d`".tar.gz" ~/backups screen -S 436.minecraft -p Server -X stuff './start.sh '
It wouldn’t be hard to make the script scp the file to a different server or possibly push to a cloud provider like Dropbox. The key here is that it also brings the server back up so you could very easily make this a completely automatic task if so inclined.
