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. There is a system crontab for all users and each user has his/her own crontab:

You can view this with

crontab -l

And edit it with:

crontab -e

which opens up your default editor. You can set a different editor with

export EDITOR=/usr/bin/yourfavoriteeditor