Backup your server on mega.co.nz using megatools

13 Feb 2015 Matteo Mattei linux bash backup megatools

Mega is a wonderful and secure online cloud service that offers 50GB of free storage. So I thought that it would be great using it as additional backup service for my Linux servers. Fortunately there is a good application library and tools to access Mega storage from Linux command line. This tools are called megatools and it is released under GPLv2 license.

In this post I will show you how to compile, install and configure a full backup system for your server using Mega and MegaTools.

First of all register an account with Mega at http://mega.co.nz then follow these instructions to compile and install megatools.

#!/bin/bash

VERSION="1.9.95"

apt-get install -y build-essentials pkg-config libglib2.0-dev libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libfuse-dev glib-networking

wget http://megatools.megous.com/builds/megatools-${VERSION}.tar.gz
tar xzf megatools-${VERSION}.tar.gz
cd megatools-${VERSION}
./configure && make && make install && ldconfig

Note: the above instructions are valid for Debian 7 Wheezy and Debian 8 Jessie. In case you have a different Linux distribution please install the required dependencies.

Now that you have MegaTools installed in /usr/local/bin create a configuration file with your credentials in /root/.megarc:

[Login]
Username = Your_Mega_Username
Password = Your_Mega_Password

Since the password is in clear, it is important to protect the file:

chmod 640 /root/.megarc

Test now your mega installation and login credentials:

root@debian:~# megals 
/Contacts
/Inbox
/Root
/Trash

If all goes well you are ready to prepare your backup script. Create a new file called megabackup.sh and place it in /root:

Make it executable and accessible only to root:

chmod 750 /root/megabackup.sh

You only need to set a cron-job now to execute the backup every day:

04 04 * * * root /root/megabackup.sh

Update 2015-02-14: MegaFuse

I recently found a better tool to accomplish my needings, it is called MegaFuse and it works like a Linux mountpoint. First of all download all needed dependencies:

apt-get install libcrypto++-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libdb5.1++-dev libfreeimage-dev libreadline-dev libfuse-dev make

Then download MegaFuse and compile it:

git clone https://github.com/matteoserva/MegaFuse
cd MegaFuse
make

Now create a configuration file /root/.megafuse.conf with your Mega credentials:

USERNAME = your_mega_email
PASSWORD = your_mega_password
MOUNTPOINT = /mnt

The above configuration assume you will use /mnt as your mountpoint (change it if you want).

Protect it in the same way:

chmod 640 /root/.megafuse.conf

And this is the revisited script to do the backup:

You can now configure the cronjob:

04 04 * * * root /root/megafusebackup.sh