In Part 1 I clarified a few points on the Dropbox tutorial for getting the server running on a headless Linux server and while I had it running it was ‘locked’ to an ssh session, i.e. close the session and the Dropbox server also stopped. The same tutorial provides links to sample init.d files which can be used to start the Dropbox server on boot. This works well enough but there were a couple of things that, again, could have done with a bit more detail. The Wiki post provides links to start up files for Ubuntu, Fedora and Gentoo – I’ll obviously be using the Ubuntu version here. I simple copied and pasted the script into nano and changed the DROPBOX_USERS to read:

DROPBOX_USERS="root"

I also took the ‘header’ information from the bottom of the page and pasted it after line one.

This file was then saved to /etc/init.d/dropbox and made executable by running

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/dropbox

Now we need to create the init script links and fortunately there is a helper script that we can use;

sudo update-rc.d dropbox defaults

Finally, back at the original Dropbox Wiki article, there is an upstart script that needs to be saved to /etc/init/dropbox.conf.

Job done – all we need to do now is to start the Dropbox server and this is a simple matter of running the following command in a terminal (I did this as root).

I ran a quick test by cd’ing to the Dropbox folder and creating a simple text file and saving it. Navigating to the Dropbox site confirmed that the file had been synced successfully.

So, now with a Dropbox server running and syncing as expected all I need to do now is to create a script that will perform the required operations, i.e. backing up the MySQL database and create a tarball of the blog folder itself. This script will be run on a schedule using cron.