🔐 Encrypted Password File Backup Script – backup.sh

🧾 Project Summary

I successfully delivered a robust, automated solution to back up sensitive encrypted password files modified in the last 24 hours. The deliverable was a fully functional Bash script (backup.sh) scheduled via cron, ensuring daily, secure, and timestamped archiving of updated credentials.

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🚀 Key Achievements

✅ Developed a modular, well-documented Bash script for secure backups ✅ Implemented timestamp-based logic to detect file changes within the last 24 hours ✅ Used array handling to dynamically collect files eligible for backup ✅ Created compressed tarball backups with precise naming convention ✅ Deployed the script to /usr/local/bin/ and verified execution permissions ✅ Validated behavior with sample sensitive documents and manual triggering ✅ Automated execution using cron, scheduled every 24 hours ✅ Confirmed backup file creation and proper destination placement

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📦 Features

• 🔍 Change Detection: Backs up only the files modified in the past 24 hours
• 🕰️ Timestamped Backups: Ensures traceability with naming like backup-<timestamp>.tar.gz
• 🔐 Secure Handling: Focused on encrypted password file scenarios
• 🧰 Portable CLI Tool: Script installed under /usr/local/bin for universal access
• 📆 Cron Integration: Seamless daily backups without manual intervention

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🛠 Script Usage

./backup.sh <targetDirectory> <destinationDirectory>

📂 Example:

./backup.sh important-documents /home/project

The script will:

• Scan important-documents/ for updated files
• Archive and compress them
• Output backup-<timestamp>.tar.gz to /home/project

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📂 Example Backup Output

backup-1720895642.tar.gz

Created inside the destination directory, containing only the relevant files updated in the last 24 hours.

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📅 Cron Job Configuration

To automate the script execution every 24 hours, a cron job was created with:

0 0 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh /path/to/source /path/to/destination

During testing, the cron service was manually started in the environment using:

sudo service cron start

…and stopped afterward with:

sudo service cron stop

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🧪 Testing Procedure

1. Deployed important-documents.zip test package
2. Unzipped and used touch to simulate recent modification timestamps
3. Executed backup.sh and verified archive generation
4. Moved script to /usr/local/bin/ and set +x permission
5. Scheduled cronjob and validated repeated backup creation

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📁 Final Directory Structure

.
├── backup.sh
├── important-documents/
├── backup-*.tar.gz
└── /usr/local/bin/backup.sh  # Globally executable