What is JABS?

JABS, which is the acronym for Just Another Backup Script, is nothing else that just another backup script for the VMWare ESX 3.x platform.

It was written when the  ESX 3.0 was released because the old VMBK script, which did a great job with the 2.x version of ESX, didn't work anymore and I have no time to wait for a fix. So I studied a little the new infrastructure, found the vcbSnapAll script and modified it to fit my needs.

Basically, JABS is a vcbSnapAll script with a little logic to select the guests to backup and to send a mail with the log of the backup; so it will select some guests into a ESX host and execute a vcbMounter commmand againsts that guests.

It accepts the same options as vcbSnapAll but the only needed is the configuration file (-s option), in which you can set all you need to do a scheduled backup. I refer to that files as 'sessions'; so we have one file per session.

Once you have written your configuration(s), simply schedule the script as usual using then cron.