Scheduled Backup

Many entrepreneurs are too busy to back up their documents. Not having a backup of your company records can cause a lot of problems. For instance, if your computer crashes, you'll lose your payroll, attendance sheets and inventory records. Just imagine the time to redo all of these documents. The lost time will result in lost revenue and the possibility of discrepancies in your records. To save you from the hassle of data loss, check out an online file storage with a scheduled backup feature.

Online storage for files is not only good for backing up data. You can also share documents with other employees conveniently. This service is ideal for those who want to share large files that cannot be sent through email. You can control how your employees can upload, download and manage files by setting user permissions. Files can also be shared with other personnel without user accounts. You just send them a link and they can download the files from their computers.

Protect important company documents by storing them in a safe virtual drive through SmartFile. Choose from our different storage packages to suit your needs. You can use our service free for 14 days by signing up for our trial.

A lot of things can happen to your files. This is the reason it's always wise to back up your important data but even if you save them in another computer or your external hard drive, they can get corrupted, broken, damaged, and infected by viruses or be accessed by unauthorized people. What do you do to make sure your files are fully protected from damage, loss and unauthorized access?

The most effective tip you can follow on how to back up data efficiently is to have an online backup service that not only provides file hosting but also other features like scheduled backups, password protection and authorized user access.  

SmartFile makes online data storage easy for everyone. You don't need to be an expert on programming to understand how our system works. You simply have to sign up for our free 14 day trial and we will help you through the whole thing. You will have several options on how you can access your account. If you are familiar with File Transfer Protocol, you can use that to transfer files from your computer to our servers and vice versa. You may also opt to access your account through our website and drag and drop files that you want to store in our servers. What are you waiting for? Be Smart. Secure your files with us.

When you’re looking for an online management service for your business, make sure that you choose one that offers a comprehensive range of FTP automatic services.

You should look for a service that will allow you to automatically resume broken transfer. A lot of things could interrupt file uploads and downloads. To save time and avoid further problems, make sure you choose a company that offers automatic uploads, downloads and scheduled backups. This way, you can put file management at the back of your mind because you know you have a trusted company that is managing your files.

When files are uploaded, there are some services which allow you to automate access permission for the newly uploaded files. SmartFile for instance, allows you to determine which users in your group or account can read, write, or execute specific files in the server.

File deletion may also be automated. Once files are uploaded or downloaded to another destination, you can authorize your server to automatically delete the source files. This is one of those tedious and time-consuming tasks that people tend to forget or are reluctant to perform, which is why it’s a great thing if your File Transfer Protocol site can do it for you.

If you have been looking for a convenient and reliable online management service, you should take advantage of our 14-day free trial. Experience how easy managing your data is with a service like ours.

We all know how important it is to back up our files. Whether you are managing a business or just a personal website, having a regular back up schedule takes a lot of worries away. With everything you need to do, it's very easy to forget about your back up schedule and let a week or a month pass by without being able to back up your important data.

To avoid forgetting to back up your files, you must look for the best online storage site that offers more than just file storage but also a scheduled backup feature. With this service, you know that your files are regularly backed up even if you don't initiate it manually. A scheduled back up gives you more freedom to do other things and gives you the peace of mind that your important files are protected if anything happens to your main server or if your web hosting service suddenly encounters a problem. 

SmartFile is the best online storage site. We offer a great express backup software you can use to protect your files. Our programs meet API standards, making our service the best there is on the market. Take advantage of our free 14 day trial today.

We all have important files stored in our computers. These can range from personal files to business related data that you need to protect from unauthorized individuals. Because you can't and shouldn't only depend on your computer to store and secure your files, you need to find another way to keep your files and protect them from data corruption and unauthorized access.

A reliable backup system should be one of your priorities if you want to avoid losing your data or having your system hacked. Sure, you can always make copies of your files and store them in external storage devices but this is not always advisable since these devices can easily be damaged, lost, or stolen.

To secure your files, you should get an account on an online storage website. SmartFile offers a reliable online management service with an express backup software you can use to easily backup important data. With our service, you'll have a virtual hard drive where you can drag and drop files from your computer to our system. This makes it easier for you to choose files you want to store in or remove from our system. You can also set a schedule for backing up and updating your data so you never forget to backup your files. Get all these features for free by signing up for a free 14 day trial now.

Due to high demands, numerous projects and busy schedules, people often find themselves out of computer space to save their business and personal files. This is the reason online storage for files is becoming popular these days. The use of CDs and other storage devices is not enough for the needs of a busy businessman. These devices are also susceptible to theft, can be easily damaged or, plainly misplaced. Online storage websites allow the user to store and access whatever files he chooses to anytime and from any part of the globe.

One of the best features of online storage is data backup. Having back-up for files gives you the peace of mind that your most important files are well protected and are within your reach anytime, anywhere. You also won't have to worry so much about your computer getting a virus or files being corrupted because you know that even if something goes wrong in your computer, you can always retrieve your files online. Also, online storage allows you to share files easily and securely.

There are many online storage services to choose from. SmartFile is the leading online storage provider today. Sign up for a 14 day free trial now and start backing up your files today.

    We have already gone through a few of that FTP programs that we have tested with SmartFile. The newest program I have tested is Auto FTP Manager. The look of the program is pretty standard issue; however, it does offer several unique features.

The first is the server-to-server connection. Most FTP clients only allow you to connect from your local PC to the server. In this case you would need to connect to the server you are requesting files from and download them to your local machine. Once downloaded, you could connect to the second server and upload the files. This can be very time consuming depending on the amount of files you have. Auto FTP allows you to make a connection to server 2 from server 1 and copy files directly between them without making a local copy. This is my favorite feature of the program.

Next is the ability to set up profiles and use rules and filters to automate the file transfer process. An example is that I can create rules so that when I upload files to the server, it will automatically delete them from my local machine when it is finished. Also once the transfer is complete I can move the files to a specific backup folder on the server. This can all be set up to be done automatically everytime I transfer files.

It also has the capabilities to schedule transfers. Using its command line interface and the integrated scheduler it can run as a scheduled task and automatically upload files based on the name, modification date, or file type. In that respect it can almost run as a backup utility. It can run at specific times (hourly, daily, etc.) to FTP files automatically.

There are several other useful features Auto FTP offers. There are only two drawbacks that I see. The first is that it runs on Windows only. It doesnt have a multi platform install like some other FTP programs. The second is the supported protocols. While it does support FTP and FTPS, that is where it stops. It does not have the option to use FTPES which is the secure protol SmartFile uses for FTP.

Overall this is a really good ftp program. I would definately recommed this for a Windows users needing a substantial FTP program.

You may not have the ability to install the SmartBackup client but still need to backup your files. An easy way to do that without the backup software is by using a FTP batch file. Here is an example of how to do that.

First you need to create a text file with the commands you want to run. We will call this ftpbackup.txt. The file should look like this:

yourUserName
yourPassword
cd backup/folder (select the directory you are backing up to)
binary
prompt n
mput *.*
quit

The mput command copies all of the files from your local folder to the server. If you need to copy files from the server to your local computer use mget. Once you have that file saved you will need to create the batch file. We will call that ftpbackup.bat. It should look like this:

ftp -s:ftpbackup.txt (sitename).smartfile.com

Now that you have your batch file you can run it from a command prompt or set it up as a scheduled task to run as often as you like. Remember this is not as secure as the backup utility. It does store you password in plain text but it will work in a pinch.

SmartFile provides a backup client for Windows. However, if you have Linux servers, it is just as important to back them up as well. Since SmartFile provides FTP access to your space, this task can be easily accomplished with some tools you likely already have installed.

This article will detail the steps to perform a simple, safe, encrypted backup directly to the SmartFile servers. At the end of the article a script will be provided that you can simply install onto your system to perform nightly backups.

Required Tools

Tar is historically for creating Tape ARchives. Thus backing up to a tape would usually involve using tar. Tar has many features including compression and is great for performing backups of Linux systems. Not only can it write to a tape, but also to a file on disk. Further, it can write the archive to stdout, so it can be fed into another program.

OpenSSL is an open source library and command line application that is capable of performing myriad encryption tasks. It is basically the swiss army knife of encryption for Linux systems. For our purposes, we will use it to encrypt our backup file before sending it to the FTP server. By default openssl will read input from stdin and output to stdout. This is perfect for our purposes.

cURL is a network client that is URL driven. It allows uploading or downloading to or from FTP or HTTP servers. For us, the main feature that cURL provides is that you can stream data directly to a file on an FTP server. Let me explain, while most FTP clients will allow you to upload a file from your file system to an FTP server this requires that the file you wish to send to the FTP server already exist on your disk. What is wanted for our backup is a way to “stream” the backup file directly to the FTP server without touching the local disk. cURL provides this with the -T option. If -T is passed – as the file, then the file data is read from stdin.

Now that we are familiar with the tools, let’s take a look at how we will use them all together. Linux allows multiple commands to be chained together by piping the output (stdout) of one command on to the input (stdin) of another command. The | or pipe character is used for this purpose. Thus at a high level, we will be doing the following.

tar | openssl | curl

Tar will create the backup of our system, openssl will then encrypt that backup and curl will transfer it to the FTP server, all without creating any temporary files that we would otherwise need to be cleaned up later.

All that remains is to determine what parameters each of the above commands needs to be given to get the behavior we want.

Tar – Parameters.

To create an archive, you use the c option. To compress the archive using Bzip2, you use the j option. Since we want to back up the entire system, our tar command thus far is.

tar cj /

By omitting any option to save the archive to disk, tar will by default output it to stdout. This allows us to pass the archive data to the next program in our chain without saving it to disk.

There are certain directories within your Linux system that should not be backed up. Some examples are:

• /proc – The proc file system is provided by the Linux kernel and contains information about running programs.
• /sys – The sys file system is provided by the kernel and contains information about hardware.
• /dev – The dev file system consists of device nodes, which represent Linux device drivers.

Backing up the above directories would be folly, as they are provided by the kernel, and some of them (/dev/zero) are actually infinite in size. So, the second set of parameters we will pass to tar will exclude these file systems.
tar cj / --exclude=/proc --exclude=/dev --exclude=/sys

You may also wish to exclude /mnt, as generally you will have other file systems mounted there. These may be remote file systems that are already being backed up via other means. Of course, /mnt may contain file systems that you wish to back up. Your system configuration will dictate your choice here.

OpenSSL – Parameters.

We want openssl to perform encryption, thus we pass it the enc option. Also, I have opted to use the aes-256 algorithm in cbc mode, so we must pass that as well. Finally, openssl requires a key to perform our encryption. This key will be derived from a passphrase, this derivative procedure will use a salt value, so we also provide that option. We will store the passphrase in a file, so that openssl can retrieve it from that file.

openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -salt -pass file:/etc/backup-key

And we can create the key by doing the following.

echo 'This is my backup key!' > /etc/backup-key
chmod 400 /etc/backup-key

Of course, you are well-advised to use something other than the example key above.

cURL – Parameters.

Now, the final step in our backup procedure is to actually transfer the file to SmartFile. We will do this using cURL and the FTP protocol. cURL is driven by URLs, so we must provide one.

curl ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

This tells curl to connect to www.smartfile.com and move into the backup directory. However, if the backup directory does not exist, curl will fail. Thus we will ask curl to create it for us if it does not exist.

curl --ftp-create-dirs ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

Now, as I alluded to before, we want curl to upload the data that it receives from it’s stdin. This is achieved by using the -T option like so.

curl --ftp-create-dirs -T - ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

If we want to use SSL, there are a couple of other options to provide. I suggest skipping SSL if you are already encrypting the backup file. However, if you want to use SSL, you would use the following parameters.

curl --ftp-create-dirs --ftp-ssl --ftp-ssl-reqd --insecure -T - ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

We are almost done, the final bit of information that curl needs is a username and password. We could have provided it as part of the URL, but that would expose our credentials to anyone snooping on the machine while the backup is running. It is safer to place the credentials into a file and instruct curl to retrieve them from the file. cURL is capable of doing this using a .netrc file. You can create the .netrc file like so.

echo machine www.smartfile.com login <username> password <password> > ~/.netrc
chmod 400 ~/.netrc

Of course, replace <username> and <password> with your username and password respectively. Now we instruct cURL to use our new .netrc file.

curl --ftp-create-dirs --ftp-ssl --ftp-ssl-reqd --insecure --netrc -T - ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

Putting it all together.

Now that you understand the basic building blocks of our backup to FTP solution. Please allow me provide you with a working script. This script was written and tested on CentOS 5.4. Some of the utilities used are out-of-date, for example, the version of curl available from the CentOS repositories uses some deprecated options, on other distributions, you may need to make modifications to these options. You will need to edit the configuration section of the script if you want to customize the behavior.

To install and use this backup script follow the steps below.

Download the script in the following location and ensure it is executable.
wget http://www.smartfile.com/downloads/smartfile-backup.sh -O /usr/local/bin/smartfile-backup.sh
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/smartfile-backup.sh
Customize the configuration section.
Create your key and .netrc files as directed above.
Finally, schedule it to run with cron. The example below will run at midnight every night.
crontab -e
0 0 * * * /usr/local/bin/smartfile-backup.sh
You can also run the script manually to ensure it works properly.

/bin/bash -x /usr/local/bin/smartfile-backup.sh

Restoring from a backup.

To restore the backup, or to retrieve files from the backup you can follow the steps below.

1. Download the backup file.
2. Decrypt the backup file.
3. Use tar to extract what you need.

Download the backup file.

You can either use the SmartFile web interface or FTP to retrieve the file.

Decrypt the backup file.

You can use OpenSSL to decrypt the file. The following command line would do the trick.

openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -salt -pass pass:'This is my backup key!' -in full-2010-06-03.tar.bz2 -out full-2010-06-03.tar.bz2.dec

Use tar to extract what you need.

You can either extract the entire archive or a portion of it. Below are commands to perform either task. For more information, read the tar man page..

mkdir /tmp/restore
tar xjf full-2010-06-03.tar.bz2.dec -C /tmp/restore

mkdir /tmp/restore
tar xjf full-2010-06-03.tar.bz2.dec -C /tmp/restore /path/to/file

** Note **
You may receive the following warning during extraction:

bzip2: (stdin): trailing garbage after EOF ignored

This seems harmless, you can get rid of it by either writing the archive to disk before transfer or using gzip instead of bzip2. The archive still decompresses fine, but tar is apparently outputting some additional garbage when using bzip2 and outputting to stdout. I personally still using bzip2 and stdout, as the advantages (greater compression ratio, no temp disk space required) outweigh the disadvantages.