I was recently looking for a simpler alternative to something like RANCID to periodically backup all our MikroTik configs.

RANCID is great and all, but I didn’t really need the diff copies of each file, and I was plenty happy just knowing that I have a .backup and .rsc file for each router I manage.

Given I use Gmail it might have been ok just to have each router send them there and leave it at that, but I’m not really the sort of person to half-ass my afterhours projects.. I learnt from Greg that you have to just whole-ass them 🙂

So, there’s plenty of ways to have a MikroTik router backup and send a copy of it’s config to an email account, but what I really wanted to do was have them automagically move into a Google Drive folder of my choosing. Why Google Drive? Well I already use GMail so I have 30GB of hosted space I can keep everything together in, so why wouldn’t I?! This also sync between my Desktop and Laptop so I’ll always have copies of the backups with me.

I searched around and finally stumbled across this post about  a script called “Send to Google Drive” that can run in the background on your GMail account all the time.

Perfect!

So to start with I created a script to export, send and then remove config files from the local router (saved as backup-and-email):

#### Modify these values to match your requirements ####

#Your email address to receive the backups
:local toemail "[email protected]"

#The From address (you can use your own address if you want)
:local fromemail "[email protected]"

#A mail server your machines can send through
:local emailserver "smtp.example.com"

############## Don’t edit below this line ##############

:local sysname [/system identity get name]
:local textfilename
:local backupfilename
:local time [/system clock get time]
:local date [/system clock get date]
:local newdate "";
:for i from=0 to=([:len $date]-1) do={ :local tmp [:pick $date $i];
:if ($tmp !="/") do={ :set newdate "$newdate$tmp" }
:if ($tmp ="/") do={}
}
#check for spaces in system identity to replace with underscores
:if ([:find $sysname " "] !=0) do={
:local name $sysname;
:local newname "";
:for i from=0 to=([:len $name]-1) do={ :local tmp [:pick $name $i];
:if ($tmp !=" ") do={ :set newname "$newname$tmp" }
:if ($tmp =" ") do={ :set newname "$newname_" }
}
:set sysname $newname;
}
:set textfilename ($"newdate" . "-" . $"sysname" . ".rsc")
:set backupfilename ($"newdate" . "-" . $"sysname" . ".backup")
:execute [/export file=$"textfilename"]
:execute [/system backup save name=$"backupfilename"]
#Allow time for export to complete
:delay 2s

#email copies
:log info "Emailing backups"
/tool e-mail send to=$"toemail" from=$"fromemail" server=[:resolve $emailserver] port=25 subject="[Config Backup] $sysname $time" file=$"textfilename"
#Send as different subjects to force GMail to treat as new message thread.
:local time [/system clock get time]
/tool e-mail send to=$"toemail" from=$"fromemail" server=[:resolve $emailserver] port=25 subject="[Config Backup] $sysname $time" file=$"backupfilename"

#Allow time to send
:delay 10s

#delete copies
/file remove $textfilename
/file remove $backupfilename

Next I logged into my gmail account and created a label called “RBackup” and another called “RBackup Saved” for the files to flow into, then logged into Google Drive and created a new folder in the root directory called “Router Backups”

Then as instructed I copied the spreadsheet provided and set the values as follows:

Then followed the 2 step procedure to authorise and run the app.

Next I created the filter in GMail for all emails from [email protected] destined to [email protected] where subject contained “[Config Backup]” and move it into the newly created “RBackup” folder/label.

Any emails that get moved here will be processed the by script, have the “RBackupSaved” label appended to them and attachments moved into the predetermined “Router Backups” folder I created in Google Drive.

To test I manually ran the script on my router and waited; it takes about a minute sometimes for the script to see the files, but the end result is that each night a new copy of all my router backups come flying into my Google Drive folder ready for any emergencies.

Next step is to ensure there’s a scheduler entry to have the script run each night, week, month or however often you’d like your backups.

/system scheduler
add interval=1d name=daily-backup on-event="/system script run backup-and-email" policy=ftp,reboot,read,write,policy,test,winbox,password,sniff,sensitive,api start-date=jan/01/2014 start-time=04:00:00

Big thanks to the fellow at Labnol.org who made his script freely available, hopefully mine is of use to some of you as well!

The finished product: