Wonder this is the right place to ask about cron jobs

Just a simply one, won't take a few minutes

I thought of 2 ways of backing up my /home directory:
1. straight backup (record) into a CD-R
2. tar.gz it and then copy it into the CD-R (is it possible?)

So the 2nd option would have 2 lines in the crontab, say:
00 23 * * * tar -cvzf /tmp/xxx.tar.gz /home
30 23 * * * cp /tmp/xxx.tar.gz /mnt/cdrom

Anyone reckon this would work? would it be faster than the 1st option?

ChEErs,
~WiLL~

If I recall correctly, you would need to make an iso image before burning to cdrom.
With that in mind, you could look into mondoarchive which can do that automatically as part of the cron job.

I used the ( -F ) switch so it doesn't pop an error about no floppy being made.

Here are a couple of examples from man mondoarchive...

EXAMPLES
Backup to a directory; note that /mnt/foo's contents will be backed up except for its ISO's unless you exclude it, as follows:-
mondoarchive -Oi -d /mnt/foo -E /mnt/foo

Backup to tape, using lzo compression:
mondoarchive -Ot -d /dev/st0 -L -s 4000m

Verify existing tape backup which was made with lzo compression:-
mondoarchive -Vt -d /dev/st0 -L

Backup to 700MB CD-R disks using a 16x CD burner:
mondoarchive -Oc 16 -s 700m

Verify existing CD-R or CD-RW backup (works for either):-
mondoarchive -Vc 16

Backup to an NFS mount:
mondoarchive -On 192.168.1.2:/home/nfs -d /Monday -E /mnt/nfs

Verify existing NFS backup:-
mondoarchive -Vn 192.168.1.2:/home/nfs -d /Monday

Backup to 650MB CD-RW disks using a 4x CD ReWriter:
mondoarchive -Ow 4

Backup just youre /home and /etc directory to 650MB CD-RW disks using a 4x CD ReWriter:
mondoarchive -Ow 4 -I "/home /etc''

Backup to ISO's non-interactively, e.g. as a job running in /etc/cron.daily:
mondoarchive -Oig9 -d /bkp/`date +%A` -E /bkp

Wow... very detailed explanation, homey~

I'll get right to it, hehe

Thanks~!

Mondo... sounds kinda familiar... i need to download it right?

Yeah I had to download it.

I am still looking at mondo

But something else is bothering me at the moment; crontab, permissions and ownerships...
Since its not a good idea to run stuff as root, so I created /etc/cron.allow and added a user there; "will" in my case.
So to edit crontab i typed: crontab -uwill -e

I have a backup executable stored in /mnt/backup where /mnt is owned by root and /mnt/backup is will.

cron failed to run initially because last night i created and ran everything as root, now i changed /mnt/backup and the script's ownership to will, it works fine...
Just wondering if its better to change ownership or change the rwx permission of the file and directory where the script is stored?

I also can't reboot my PC if i ran cron with will, i got this message in /var/spool/mail/will:
reboot: must be superuser