Linux Help... Cron Jobs

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 21:15:28 Post Subject: Linux Help... Cron Jobs

I am trying to setup automated backups of the site from the active hard drive to a backup drive I have installed.

It is currently doing it, but only creates three files... One that it over writes every night during a backup, one on a weekly basis, and one on a monthly basis.

I'd rather not lose the daily one so quickly, and would prefer to have a whole weeks worth of daily backups available. Currently I also make manual daily backups to my home machine, but would rather it all be automated, and online.

First... Help me understand the commands to make a gzip archive at the command line... Something like:

IceNine · Posted: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 21:19:28 Post Subject:

You'll need a shell script that analyzes the dates for you. I would recommend having the date in the title - it keeps it simple that way. I'll see what I can come up with after I get home.

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 21:32:17 Post Subject:

Wait, I see in my Cron Job info that I can not only set them to run every certain number of hours, days, etc... I can actually set them to run on certain days only.

Maybe then its just a matter of having a separate Cron Job for every day? Is that reasonable?

So... would my command above work?

BeerCheeze · Posted: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 21:34:10 Post Subject:

I'll show this to Misty, she does this stuff all the time.

misty · Posted: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 14:40:22 Post Subject:

You could always create a script that would append the date to the file name, something like.

#!/bin/ksh (where ever ksh is located)

FILENAME=dir.tar.`date +%m%d%Y`.gz

tar c dir/ | gzip > $FILENAME

I don't know much about gzip, so I can't tell you whether the syntax is right. I would set up one cron jobs to run daily using the script above so each job would have a different name. Then maybe also run a cleanup jobs that would find files older than 7 days and delete them.

misty · Posted: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 15:23:41 Post Subject:

Okay.. ignore me if you want to, but here's how you could make an archive.

#!/bin/ksh (where ever ksh is located)

FILENAME=dir.tar.`date +%m%d%Y`.tgz

tar -cvzf $FILENAME dir/

To write to another drive:

tar -cvzf $FILENAME /disk2/archive/$FILENAME

To cleanup your backups older than seven days you could run this script daily via cron.

find /dir/path -name "dir.tar*" -mtime +7 -exec rm {} ;

Something like that.. I think that will work, I just came up with it so it's never been tested.

misty · Posted: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 15:36:53 Post Subject:

To schedule stuff to run daily in cron at 10pm:

00 22 * * * /dir/path/command

minute hour day_of_month month weekday command

These fields accept the following values:

minute 0 through 59

hour 0 through 23

day_of_month 1 through 31

month 1 through 12

weekday 0 through 6 for Sunday through Saturday

command a shell command

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 16:05:47 Post Subject:

Whoa... Thanks! I'll try something once I process all of that! Yikes

BeerCheeze · Posted: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 18:20:44 Post Subject:

Great huh? I'm married to a Unix geek... Laughing

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 19:26:06 Post Subject:

I think I got it. I set up one to take just the public_html area of the site and gzip over onto the second drive at 5 PM on Wednesdays only.

Just got home and see I have a 160MB file with the proper name right where I wanted it! Grin

Thanks!