Backup your FreeBSD system configuration.

I set up a simple script to create a configuration backups of my FreeBSD box and I thought I would share it. Note that this script will only back up the /etc and /usr/local/etc directories and weighs in at just under 1MB per backup.

First create a backup script as we can't execute our complex command directly in cron.  You may want to customize the exclude options to your licking, the two listed exclusions are the rather large gconf defaults, witch is not needed, and the working files for transmission.

sudo vim /usr/local/sbin/backup-config
bash -c 'tar -czf /root/freebsd-cfg-`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`.tgz --exclude={etc/gconf,usr/local/etc/transmission/home/{resume,torrents,Downloads,blocklists}} /etc/ /usr/local/etc/'

Now make it executable.

chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/backup-config

Now add the job to cron and set it to run weekly as root.

sudo vim /etc/crontab# Backup the entire server configuration once a week.
0 1 * * 0 root backup-config 2>/dev/null