Automate backups: Nextcloud to S3

Assumptions

• Disk space: at least 3× the size of the /var/www/nextcloud directory is available on /var/backups
• Nextcloud is installed into /var/www/nextcloud as user www-data
• AWS cli is installed and configured with credentials
• mysqldump is installed
• rsync is installed

Setup

Create file /root/cron-env with these contents:

HOME=/root
LOGNAME=root
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
SHELL=/bin/sh
PWD=/root

Create executable file /root/run-as-cron with these contents:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/env -i $(cat /root/cron-env) "$@"

Create executable file /root/backup-nextcloud-to-s3.bash with these contents.

Configure cron

0 5 * * * /root/backup-nextcloud-to-s3.bash

Run manually

./run-as-cron /root/backup-nextcloud-to-s3.bash