minecraft-server-utils

A few utility bash scripts I wrote that

1. start an already-installed vanilla Minecraft server on system boot,
2. keep an up-to-date incremental backup of the world and server files,
3. as well as daily snapshots for the history books,
4. and optionally purge old snapshots whenever disk space runs low.

In principle, these scripts should work on any *nix system (e.g. macOS or any Linux distribution). However, I have only tested them on a ridiculously old (but still almost fast enough to host a Minecraft server for two people) laptop running Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS.

Setup

1. Make sure that bash, cron and rsync (among others) are installed on your system (if you're not sure, you likely have them). Then install screen:

   apt-get install screen

2. Now, modify the included file .mcsurc according to the instructions in the file and copy it to your home directory:

   # first modify .mcsurc, then:
   cp .mcsurc ~

3. Finally, set up your crontab: Run crontab -e and paste the contents of mcsu.crontab at the end of the buffer. If you don't want to purge old snapshots, comment-out the corresponding line.

After completing these steps, reboot. Once your system is up again, the Minecraft server should be up and running (you can manage it by running screen -r mcs to attach to the screen session and pressing first ctrl+A, then D to deattach) and backups should be performed regularly (check this by looking at the target directory you've configured in step 2, or if it's still empty after a while, inspect the log files).