config-bak

A little over 4 years ago, I wrote a script to backup my configuration files in case I made a change to them that didn’t work out or accidentally deleted them. My first rendition of the script was quite linear and consisted individual blocks of code for each file I was backing up and it grew to be quite large. But it worked, and I used it in that for for a couple of years. Later on, I put each of those individual routines into functions. It was still quite linear. Recently, I reviewed the script and noticed that most of these functions were identical, the only variations were the configuration files themselves.

After taking a close look at the code, I determined that, with only a few exceptions, most of the files to be backed up were either in the root of my home directory or under the .config directory. I created functions to back up files for each case. There were still some exceptions, such as configuratins that might have different names or locations, depending ont the version, desktop environment, or operating system. I wrote functions for those special cases. Now the script would call a more generic function and pass the path and file name to it, or one of the specific functions for the special cases.

Then I started seeing similarities in the special cases and figured that in most of them, I could use the generic functions using the partiuluar parameters for each case. That left only a small handful of files that didn’t fit either generic case. I have a program whose configuration file is in a hidden folder in the root of the home directory and another file that’s a couple levels down in my .local directory. For these special cases, I created another function that places the backup file directly in the backup folder without any directory name.

Finally, there was my dump of my Cinnamon keybindings which I keep in my .config folder. It’s not a configuration file, per se, but it’s important enough to keep a backup. It’s really the only “special case” file I currently have, so it has it own function to handle it. For the most part, it operates much the same as the other functions, but if the system is running the Cinnamon desktop enviroment, and keybinding dump doesn’t exist in the .config folder, it will create the dump file and copy it to the backup folder.

Over time, I’ve improved the appearance of the script’s output. As the script backs up the new or changed files, it displays the pertinent path and the filename, precede by an ASCII arrow (===>). It looks nice and it lets me know what’s been backed up.

Of course, there is a companion script to restore the configuration files from the local backup. Now that I’ve stremlined the backup script, I’m wondering if I can make the restoration script more modular, eliminating many of the individual functions. A precursory look at the restoration script seems to indicate that I can model it after the backup script. That’s a project for the near future.