[asterisk-users] conf checkout

[Steve Edwards]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2010, Danny Nicholas wrote:

> I see that some posters today don’t do full (or any?) backups of their 
> Asterisk systems/configuration.  This may (sort of) help you.  Since 
> pretty much all Linux systems have some sort of PERL installed, these 
> two files will let you make a quick copy of any configuration or other 
> file you might be about to change or destroy.

Good advice, however I prefer to work on a copy. I do something similar 
with a bash function:

# save a file creating a copy and appending a timestamp to the file name
         function                        save()
                 {
                 SUFFIX=$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S)
                 mv $1 $1-${SUFFIX}
                 cp $1-${SUFFIX} $1
                 }

I do the move before the copy so I can undo my mistakes just by mv'ing the 
file with the suffix back to the file name without the suffix. That way, 
even the modification* date of the file is not changed and it won't be 
backed up unnecessarily.

If whatever I screwed up isn't discovered for a few days, I can choose 
which suffixed file I want to "restore."

Better advice would be to get off your LFA and do the backups :)

For all the hosts I manage, I have a script started by crontab that 
creates a tarball of the configuration and source files and emails the 
tarball back to me. I have a rule in my procmailrc to automagically dump 
the tarball into my /backup/ directory.

This shows its value when a client says "I like it better the way it was 
before Xmas" or "Why did you charge me $XXX 6 weeks ago Tuesday."

*) I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to preserve the access and 
change dates :)

-- 
Thanks in advance,
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Edwards       sedwards at sedwards.com      Voice: +1-760-468-3867 PST
Newline                                              Fax: +1-760-731-3000