Backing up specific files and renaming them via Bash

Question

I want to create backups of certain files which are in /home directory. 

find /root/ -name 'wallet.dat' -exec cp {} /home/backup \;

I also want to change the name of the backup file to a particular format. 

The files are always in a structure like this: /home/<coinname>/.<coinname>/wallet.dat. And I want the backup file to be named <coinname>-wallet.dat so the folder /home/backup has following files:

• bitcoin-wallet.dat
• dogecoin-wallet.dat

How can I do this?

Answer 1

I have mentioned a slightly modified code that you have mentioned in the question. 

find /root/ -name 'wallet.dat' -execdir bash -c 'echo cp "$0" "/home/backup/${PWD##*/}-${0#\./}"' {} \;

Answer 2

Try this

#!/bin/bash
find . -name wallet.dat | while read x
do
   original="$x"
   # Strip filename off right end
   x=${x%/wallet.dat}
   # Strip all but last directory off left end
   x=${x##*/}
   newname="/home/backup/${x}-wallet.dat"
   echo cp "$original" "$newname"
done

Answer 3

I needed to do a similar thing and I found out this code that uses tar to do it. Code mentioned below:

$ find /root -name wallet.dat -print | tar -cv -T - -f /home/backup/wallets.tar

Comments

Why use the tar command here?

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Hi @Raj, this is a way of creating a copy of files. So, basically, this command will find the required files and send them into a tarfile. This tar file is your backup file.

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If anybody is using this command, make sure you run it only when the files are not corrupted. If you run it, irrespective of whether the files are corrupted or not, the new backup will overwrite the old backup.

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True that @Tina. To avoid this, I save each backup file with a different name and I mention the date of Backup so that I know which file to use to recover.

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@Raghu, this actually gives a checkpoint backup feature.