ChronoBak: Automated cost-effective incremental backup software for large-scale data

Reem S Alhamidi ¹

Rifat Hamoudi ^{1, 2, 3}

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Research Institute of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates |

Clinical Sciences Department, College of Medicine, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates |

Division of Surgery and Interventional Science, University College London, London, United Kingdom |

Publication type: Journal Article

Publication date: 2024-10-01

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Journal: Advances in Biomedical and Health Sciences

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ISSN: 27731545, 27731553

DOI: 10.4103/abhs.abhs_22_24

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Abstract

ABSTRACT

Background:

Data backup is an important component of data protection and management. It is especially imperative to back up large-scale data to guard against losses due to hardware failure, unauthorized access, software/system malfunction, and unintended deletion. However, businesses and organizations suffer from the financial investment required for data backup and recovery systems. Health-care systems suffer from data breaches and hacking incidents, which increase annually. Therefore, a cost-effective and highly secure backup approach is necessary.

Methods:

Seven different backup scripts were written in bash within Linux, and Crontab was used as the core chronological scheduler to execute the backup scripts on specific dates and times. These bash scripts, together with Crontab as their scheduler, were used to implement automated incremental backups on a Unix/Linux-based system.

Results:

ChronoBak is a collection of bash scripts that are compiled and executed through Crontab, which is a standard Unix/Linux function used to schedule hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance routines using Linux scripts. This strategy enabled us to implement cost-effective incremental backups within any time range.

Conclusion:

We developed ChronoBak software, which executes an automated incremental backup that is scheduled efficiently and systematically using standard and hidden directories, thereby providing an additional layer of security against cyber threats and system malfunctions.