Server Backups

Backing up a gmod server is really easy and the resulting backup is really small if you know what you need.

The worst thing you could do is: Backing up the whole GarrysMod folder.
It contains a lot of big, not-needed files and the workshop cache. You don't need to back that up.

To correctly do a backup think about what you changed and what needs to be saved.
The most important folders are (in relation to the parent folder of garrysmod):

• garrysmod/addons
• garrysmod/cfg
• garrysmod/data
• garrysmod/gamemodes
• garrysmod/lua
• garrysmod/maps
• garrysmod/sv.db
• lgsm folder OR start.sh file if not linuxgsm based

These are the only important folders that are changed on a server. You don't need to backup anything else.

WARNING: The following command expects you to have a LinuxGSM installed gmodserver.

To back it all up you can use the following command:

cd && zip -r9 bak_gmodserver_$(date +\%Y\%m\%d\%H\%M).zip lgsm/config-lgsm/gmodserver/ serverfiles/garrysmod/addons/ serverfiles/garrysmod/cfg/ serverfiles/garrysmod/data/ serverfiles/garrysmod/gamemodes/ serverfiles/garrysmod/lua/ serverfiles/garrysmod/sv.db

The resulting backup is most of the time smaller than 1GB. If you stupidly zip the whole garrysmod folder the backup size is over 10GB most of the time.

You should create automatic backups, either of your whole server or atleast of your sv.db / data folder / mysql database. This can easily be done with cronjobs.

These backups should be created as the root user, because - as previously stated in the linux setup section - the root user should only be available to the owner. This way nobody can delete or modify these backups.

automatic full backups

To automatically backup your server you can use cronjobs.

This example expects:

• a user named drp with a home folder in /home/drp
• a linuxgsm installed gmodserver in that home folder
• you are logged in as root and execute crontab -e as root

First create your backup folder with

mkdir /root/drp_backups

Then edit your cronjobs with the command

crontab -e

If asked what editor to use select "nano".

Enter the following line at the bottom to automatically backup your server everyday at 5:02am :

02 5 * * * cd /home/drp/ && zip -r9 /root/drp_backups/bak_gmodserver_$(date +\%Y\%m\%d\%H\%M).zip lgsm/config-lgsm/gmodserver/ serverfiles/garrysmod/addons/ serverfiles/garrysmod/cfg/ serverfiles/garrysmod/data/ serverfiles/garrysmod/gamemodes/ serverfiles/garrysmod/lua/ serverfiles/garrysmod/sv.db

To automatically remove old backups you can also enter the following line aswell, which will delete backups older than 7 days everyday at 6:02am :

02 6 * * * find /root/drp_backups/* -mtime +7 -exec rm {} \;

automatic data-only backups

If your server doesn't change much between updates then it's a good idea to only backup the player data regularly and a complete backup every update.

Player data includes:

• data folder
• sv.db (sqlite database)
• mysql database (if applicable)

This would mean you could store backups for longer than 7 days because they are WAY smaller, changing the above cronjobs to the following:

02 5 * * * cd /home/drp/ && zip -r9 /root/drp_backups/bak_gmodserver_$(date +\%Y\%m\%d\%H\%M).zip serverfiles/garrysmod/sv.db serverfiles/garrysmod/data
02 6 * * * find /root/drp_backups/* -mtime +21 -exec rm {} \;

backup mysql

To backup a mysql database you can use the mysqldump command.

An example: To backup a local mysql (or mariadb) database you can use the following command as root user

mysqldump -u root --all-databases > bak_mysql_20220721.sql

If the file is larger than expected you can also compress the backup on-the-fly, with for example gzip:

mysqldump -u root --all-databases | gzip > bak_mysql_20220721.sql.gz

To now automatically backup your database you can use the following cronjob entry

02 6 * * * mysqldump -u root --all-databases | gzip > /root/drp_backups/bak_mysql_$(date +\%Y\%m\%d\%H\%M).sql.gz