Fully automated backup of Satellite (check my update if you are on Satellite 6.4)

March 7, 2018 - Reading time: ~1 minute

Today I created a crontab entry to automate the backup of Satellite using katello-backup. We had this in the past but it was a bit harsh. Now we keep biweekly fulls, daily incrementals and clean up after one month. (as an example). Make sure that the backup doesn't run when you for example run your OpenScap reports, since all services are down during the backup.

#katello backup, biweekly full + daily incremental
0 2 * * 0 root expr `date +\%s` / 604800 \% 2 >/dev/null || (/usr/sbin/satellite-backup --assumeyes /backup/ && ls -td -- /backup/satellite-backup-* | head -n 1 > /backup/latest_full; find /backup/ -type d -ctime +30 -exec rm -rf {} \;)
0 2 * * 2-6 root /usr/sbin/satellite-backup --assumeyes /backup/ --incremental "$(cat /backup/latest_full | head -n1)"
#this checks if the latest backup failed and cleans up anyway to free up space
0 6 * * 0 if [[ $(find "$(cat /backup/latest_full)" -mtime +15 -print) ]]; then find /backup/ -type d -ctime +30 -exec rm -rf {} \;; fi