Hi all

Can some one give me a sample of a crontab for backing a directory please, System is Ubuntu 9.04

TT ( karl )

Note that each time you run that it will overwrite the previous backup. So, you will only ever have one backup. If something gets messed up and you don't notice it until after that script runs, then the messed up thing will be your only backup. So, you want to use a backup file name with a date stamp in the name. For example, you could use

tar -zcf /Downloads/html.bak/htmlbackup-`date +%Y%m%d`.tar.gz .

would result in a filename of htmlbackup-20100913.tar.gz for today. You could clean them out periodically, or build it into your script to remove things older than a week or a month or whatever you choose.

The cron entry to run your script at, say, 1:00am in the morning would be:

0 1 * * * /path/to/your/script

check the man pages for cron and for crontab. `crontab -l` (that is an "el") will show you the contents of your crontab. `crontab -e` will allow you to edit the crontab directly.

1 members found this post helpful.

You edit your crontab with this command:

There are a lot of other references out there that can tell you all the exact syntax, but basically first you say how often you want the job to run, then you say what command should be run.

That would run every night at 6:45pm. The first column is minutes, the second hours, third days of the month, fourth is month, and the fifth is day of the week. So

would run at 2:30am every Tuesday, and

would run only once a year, at 6:00am on New Years. That script you have should do just fine, although you'll only ever have one backup file at a time. Every time the script runs it will overwrite the old one. If you want a new file each time, you could do this:

That will append the date to the end of the filename. Oh, and the usual practice is to use .tar.gz for the file extension, not .sh.tar.gz.

Thanks guys

I'll give it ago and get back to you ASAP

TT ( karl )

The back has to go to another drive on the system, USB external drive ( /dev/sdb1 )

Would it be some thing like so

TT ( karl )

You need to use the mountpoint
use mount to see.
You could add a line to see if the drive is mounted or not, before backingup.


Kind regards

we got the mount worked out OK

when I run the script

I get the following error

Any reason why

TT ( karl )

Your mount point seems to be wrong here. /dev/sdb1 is mounted on something else.

Check the output of mount -l and see where it is mounted and use that mount point in your tar command instead of /dev/sdb1.

Else post the output of mount -l here.

Best of luck.