Using copy.com as backup/sync destination

I’ve written guides on how to backup to both Dropbox.com and Box.com and now got the request via Twitter to write how to do the same thing with copy.com. Since I didn’t have a copy.com account I had to createtwitter_copy_com one before I could look into it.

The installation guide found in the documentation only works “out of the box” if you have a GUI running and none of my servers have one.

 

These are the steps to install and configure a headless installation of the Copy.com

Installation

All of the commands are executed as root, I can not guarantee that it will work as a regular user.

Change directory to /tmp and download the installation files.  The first time I tried to download the Copy.tgz file it failed with the error message:

To avoid this I added the parameter –no-check-certificate to the wget command

Extract the files

I then decided to copy the extracted folders and files to the /opt directory before running anything

The CopyAgent (as copy.com calls their software) comes in both a 32-bit and a 64-bit version and you need to run the correct one.

If you don’t know if your VPS is 32 or 64-bit you can check it by executing

The results will then tell you that:

The server I’m testing this on is 32-bit so I change directory to the x86 directory

To create the config files you need to run the CopyConsole command with the following parameters

!UPDATE!

-r is the root of the folder you want to backup. if you set this to /home, all sub-directories in /home will be uploaded to your account.

A suggestion is to create a /backups folder and then symlink folders to that /backups folder.

it should look something like this :

When executing config files are created and a synchronization is made with your online copy.com account.

Wait until you see this text at the bottom of your terminal

You can then exit by pressing CTRL+C

You will now have a new directory with all your config files in /root/.copy/.

The root directory that you specified above is now in sync with the online copy but if you add/remove a file in the root directory it won’t get uploaded since we stopped the CopyAgent.

To start syncing in the background you can start the CopyAgent with the parameter -daemon

To make sure it gets started every time the VPS is restarted I’ve added this row as a cronjob

 

That’s it. all done!

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