Linux Log Backup Script with Automated Cleanup and Cron Scheduling

In daily development you often need to back up configuration files and log data; the following Bash script automates the backup of a specified Linux directory, deletes backup data older than a configurable number of days, and compresses the daily logs for easy storage.

#!/bin/bash #bakup system logs yesterday=`date -d -1day +%Y-%m-%d` cat /backup/syslos/ip.txt|grep -v ^#|while read ip; do log_dir=`echo $ip|awk '{print $1}'` if [ ! -d "/backup/syslog/$log_dir/$yesterday" ];then mkdir -p /backup/syslog/$log_dir/$yesterday fi rsync -avz -e ssh root@$ip:/var/log/messages /backup/syslog/$log_dir/$yesterday rsync -avz -e ssh root@$ip:/var/log/secure /backup/syslog/$log_dir/$yesterday rsync -avz -e ssh root@$ip:/var/log/boot.log /backup/syslog/$log_dir/$yesterday rsync -avz -e ssh root@$ip:/var/log/cron /backup/syslog/$log_dir/$yesterday rsync -avz -e ssh root@$ip:/var/log/lastlog /backup/syslog/$log_dir/$yesterday rsync -avz -e ssh root@$ip:/var/log/audit/audit.log /backup/syslog/$log_dir/$yesterday cd /backup/syslogs/$log_dir/$yesterday && tar -zcvf syslog.tar.gz . find . -type f -not -name '*.tar.gz' -exec rm -f {} + done find /backup/syslogs/ -type f -name "*.tar.gz" -mtime +90 -exec rm -f {} \;

The script is intended to be executed daily via cron . A typical crontab entry schedules the backup at midnight each day:

0 0 * * * cd /backup/syslog && bash syslog.sh

By using rsync over SSH, the script pulls various log files (messages, secure, boot.log, cron, lastlog, audit.log) from each host listed in /backup/syslos/ip.txt , stores them in a date‑specific directory, compresses them into syslog.tar.gz , and removes archives older than 90 days to conserve space.

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