Backup with cron

Overview

Crontab is a tool that allows you to launch applications on a regular basis, useful for a server to launch backup scripts, etc.

In this project

We have set up two commands to make a backup of :

  • the postdatabase (dump)

  • the imported Excels files (archive and compress)

Useful commands

Create instruction

crontab -e

Print

crontab -l

In our case the result is

# Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron.
#
# Each task to run has to be defined through a single line
# indicating with different fields when the task will be run
# and what command to run for the task
#
# To define the time you can provide concrete values for
# minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon),
# and day of week (dow) or use '*' in these fields (for 'any').#
# Notice that tasks will be started based on the cron's system
# daemon's notion of time and timezones.
#
# Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through
# email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected).
#
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
#
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h  dom mon dow   command

00 21 * * * tar czf /home/EMERGEN-DB/backups/mediafiles/EMERGEN-DB_mediafiles_$(date +\%Y-\%m-\%d).tar.gz -C /home/EMERGEN-DB/mediafiles .
00 21 * * * sh -c 'docker exec -t emergen-db_db_1 pg_dumpall -c -U postgres > /home/EMERGEN-DB/backups/database/EMERGEN-DB_database_$(date +\%Y-\%m-\%d).sql'

Useful documentation

Lists of some pages that can help in setting up a cron :