Scheduling nightly backups with Red Hat 9
 

I have setup my Red Hat 9 server just the way I want it and now am looking at backup procedures to ensure all data I require is readily available on some kind of backup medium (in my case an external USB hard drive) when the server is down. Coming from a windows background I haven't got the faintest were to start, although, I can see the use of shell scripts with some scheduling agent.

Can anyone assist?

the Scheduler for linux is called cron. The program for managing it is called crontab and can be viewed with man crontab. The format for the file can be seen with man 5 crontab.

Crontabs per user can be found in /var/spool/.....

once off scheduling is handled with at.

tldp.org has two great guides on shell scripting. An elementary guide and an advanced guide.

utilities for backup include :
tar
cpio
gzip
bzip2

Happy reading