Backup Script – Where to Put backup.sh in Ubuntu

The ideal solution is to create a sparsebundle image and to sync that. This can be most easily done by sharing the drive over the network and pointing Time Machine to it and starting a fresh backup.

You can also find information on creating a custom sparsebundle to use as a Time Machine backup.

The reason to do this is because a sparsebundle stores its data spread over a collection of files (8MB 'bands'). If you have a sparsebundle, you can rync it to the remote server, and rsync can just transfer the bands that have changed. With Time Machine, you typically just append onto the end, so you'll only usually be syncing the last few bands up.

Once a given band is full and OS X creates another one, the now-full band won't be written to anymore. It gets copied up one last time, and never touched again. The new band gets copied every time rsync is run until it too fills up and stops being written to.

For extra fun, there are options you can pass to hdiutil to create an encrypted disk image, so that if someone breaks into your Dreamhost machine they won't be able to harvest your files.

This is happening because your script has a .py extension. The files in /etc/cron.daily are run by the run-parts(8) command and it's default is to ignore programs that don't match various rules. You should be able to just remove the .py extension.

run-parts runs all the executable files named within constraints described below, found in directory directory. Other files and directories are silently ignored.

If neither the --lsbsysinit option nor the --regex option is given then the names must consist entirely of ASCII upper- and lower-case letters, ASCII digits, ASCII underscores, and ASCII minus-hyphens.

For example

touch /etc/cron.daily/test.py
chmod +x /etc/cron.daily/test.py
run-parts --test /etc/cron.daily
/etc/cron.daily/apache2
...

no sign of test.py

mv /etc/cron.daily/test.py /etc/cron.daily/test
run-parts --test /etc/cron.daily 
/etc/cron.daily/apache2
...
/etc/cron.daily/test

ta da !