Everybody’s Doing It

Pete, from Guerrilla Tech Support, has written a nice little howto on cron jobs.  What are cron jobs?  Read his post!

His little lesson would go along nicely with either of my last two posts about the “scripts” I use to keep my life, I mean files, in sync.

Have fun learning the ways of cron.

Another "script" I use daily

In going with the theme of my post yesterday, I thought I would add here another “script” I use to backup documents. It is a variation (simplification) of my main backup script.

This one is just for doing my grad school documents between my laptop and my desktop. It is really easy, look at it HERE.

What it does:
I run it from my laptop. It connects to my desktop (alexandria) via rsync using ssh. Any files that are older on alexandria are backed up with the date&time, and the file is updated.
The reverse then happens (alexandria to laptop) to make sure everything is updated on both sides.

It doesn’t log anything because I watch it in the terminal when I run it since I need to put in my password twice. I could make it so I wouldn’t need to input my password, but that is less secure.

Any questions about it, let me know.

My daily backup "script"

So, I am having harddrive issues right now. Luckily I have a backup script run daily that keeps everything important backed up on an external harddrive (which seems to be doing ok right now). I also have any documents for grad school on 3 separate harddrives at any one time (I have learned from my mistakes in the past).

This isn’t a blog post about how thorough I am with backups, it is a post of my backup “script” [1] so others can basically copy past (and edit some of the hard coded stuff) and use it for themselves. I was inspired by being asked “what do you use for a backup tool” and listening to the latest episode of LUGRadio where Aq says that this year his resolution is to release more of his quick dirty programs. Things he would feel bad about normally because the user would need to modify some config file for hard coded values. But, in the interest of Freedom and Sharing it is best to let other people take a look at it and get ideas for themselves.

Well, here is my “script” [1]

Hope it can inspire you to backup your stuff every night/week/whatever. Oh, and to do that part, you need to edit your “crontab” by typing: “crontab -e” in your terminal (no quotes). There are tons of guides online on what exactly to put in there, but here is mine:

# m h dom mon dow command
0 23 * * * ./UserLogs/cron_daily.sh

Which basically translates into “Every day at 23:00, run this script”

There you have it! May your data be safe!

[1] Is a pretty looking list of commands in one file a script? That is for the reader to decide