hi,

How can I archive or backup my /home directory on a daily basis automatically?

Please suggest me some methodologies,
Naveen

1. create a shell script, which tars and compresses your home directory.
2. execute that shell script with cron daily.

Ok, but I want to have only incremental backup
Dow you know how that is done?

And can you please be more elaborative with commands and other stuff? I am new to this

Please,
Thanks
Naveen

There are lots of pre-made backup scripts out on the net if you'd just google for something like "tar backup script". I found one here:

Automating backups with tar

Dennisk

Hi Dennisk,

I tried the script that you gave in the link.

Yesterday i created a backup by name nav-Tue.tar manually using "tar". (nav is my system name)
And also executed the command:
"date +%d%b < /backups/last-full/nav-full-date" where i created the file nav-full-date as text file before I could use the above command. It displayed me 29Nov on the shell itself.

Now there is only one tar that is created yesterday. I dont find nav-Wed.tar in the folder backups.

And one more thing. I have commented Monthly full backup lines. So enabled only Weekly full Backup and incremental backups.

Do I need to check if the Cron.daily is running or not? And if so how do I do that?

OR is there any other problem?

Please reply

This is additional info:

When I run the command "cron" I get a message:
cron: can't lock /var/run/cron.pid, otherpid may be 4826: Resource temporarily unavailable

I dont hav crond. I have cron in /usr/sbin
the contents of /etc/crontab are:
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/lib/news/bin
MAILTO=root
#
# check scripts in cron.hourly, cron.daily, cron.weekly, and cron.monthly
#
-*/15 * * * * root test -x /usr/lib/cron/run-crons && /usr/lib/cron/run-crons >/dev/null 2>&1
59 * * * * root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.hourly
14 4 * * * root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.daily
29 4 * * 6 root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.weekly
44 4 1 * * root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.monthly

etc/init.d/ contains cron. so i suppose the cron enabled to start at boot

:~>crontab -l lists cron jobs for the current user.

I would set your backup script to run under user instead or root. Also, it's generally not a good idea to edit crontabs directly

to edit: use crontab -e