Automating your backups with cron
Motivation
If you only do your backup when you hear about a case of someone loosing data then you will not have a recent backup when you need it. So you should automate the backup process. If you want to run a certain command at a regular interval then you can use the unix cron tool.
User and System Crontab
cron has a text based configuration file that contains the commands that should be run and when they should be run.