With GNOME Schedule, you can create a one-time cron job, recurring cron jobs, or cron jobs from templates. Let’s dig into the installation and usage of this tool.

Installation

Installing GNOME Schedule is simple, if you follow these steps, you will have this application installed in no time.

1. Open up the Add/Remove Software utility (Such as Ubuntu Software Center).
2. Search for “jobs” (no quotes).
3. Mark the Schedule Tasks application for installation.
4. Click Appy to install.
5. Accept any dependencies that might be necessary for installation.
6. Allow the installation to complete.
7. Close the Add/Remove Software utility.

Once installed, you will find GNOME Schedule in Applications > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks.

Usage

Figure 1

The usage of GNOME Schedule is simple. When you open up the main window (see Figure 1). Let’s walk through the steps for creating a recurring cron job.

Step 1: Click the new drop-down (downward pointing arrow associated with the New button) and select Recurrent Task.

Figure 2

Step 2: In the resulting window (see Figure 2) fill out all of the information necessary to create the job. The information necessary will be: Description (a name for the job), Command (the command you want to run as the recurring task), Behavior (Do you want to suppress command output, is this an X Application, etc.), Basic (Is this task to run every minute, hour, day, week, or month), Advanced (schedule the job for a specific time).

After this information is complete, click the Add button and the job will be created and scheduled.

If you look at the bottom of the scheduled task window, you will notice the Add as Template button. You can add this job as a template if it is a job you can easily base other jobs on. If you create template jobs, you can then create a new job based on that template, by click the New drop-down and selecting From Template.

Now, if you want to create cron jobs that need root (or sudo) permissions, you will need to run the tool like so:

1. Open a terminal window.
2. Issue the command sudo gnome-schedule (if you are using a non-sudo distribution, su to the root user and issue the command gnome-schedule).
3. Schedule the job as described above.

You will notice, when running in super user mode, you have an extra button – the change user button. This will allow you to schedule a cron job for any user on the system (so long as they have the ability to schedule jobs.)

Final thoughts

Gnome Schedule is a very easy way to allow new users to take advantage of the powerful cron tool, without having to learn the command line version. I recommend learning the command line for cron, but for those who don’t have the time or inclination, this is a good route to take.

Back In Time offers two GUI versions: One for GNOME and one for KDE. If you want to run the KDE version of the tool you will have to be running KDE >= 4.1. The difference between the GUIs is minimal, and there are no features on one that are on the other (it’s all in the different widget sets used.) In this tutorial you will learn how to install and use the Back In Time backup tool.

Installation

Installing Back In Time is simple. Go to the applications’ download page and download the necessary files. If you are installing on Ubuntu you will need:

backintime-common

and either:

backintime-gnome

or

backintime-kde

Before you can install this application you will need to first install the meld tool. To do this issue the command:

sudo apt-get install meld

Once Meld is installed you can install Back In Time. To do this you just need to open up a terminal window, change to the directory you downloaded the files into, and issue the command:

sudo dpkg -i backintime*

which will install both necessary files.

After the application is installed you are ready to start backing up.

Usage

To start up Back In Time go to the System Tools sub-menu of the Applications menu. There ar two entries: Back In Time and Back  In Time (root). You will want to run the non-root entry to back up your standard files.

Figure 1

When you fire up Back In Time for the first time you will be greeted, not with the main window, but the Settings Window (see Figure 1).  Before you can actually set up a back up you have to configure a backup directory. This is done in the General tab of the Settings window.

By default the Schedule will be disabled. This is fine if you want to do a one-time backup. But for scheduled backups you will need to select a frequency from the Schedule drop down.

You will also have to add at least one folder to back up. To do this go to the Include tab and add a directory to be backed up. You can, of course, add more than one directory to back up.

From within the Auto-remove tab in the Settings window there is a setting I highly recommend. If you check the “Smart Remove” check box Back In Time will:

• Keep all snapshots from today and yesterday.
• Keep one snapshot from last week and one from two weeks prior.
• Keep one snapshot per month for all previous months of the year.
• Keep one snapshot per year for all previous years.

If you have any need to retain snapshots, this is a fairly safe bet.

From within the Exclude tab you can configure Back In Time for folders and/or files to not include in the backup. You can also add patterns to exclude, which can include wildcards.

After you have all of your settings taken care of click OK and Back In Time is set up and ready to go.

What about that scheduled backup?

Here’s the deal – Back In Time does not have a Panel icon to keep the application running in the background. So unless you plan on keeping the application open, you have to have another means to make sure your backups happen.  In order to do this you have to know the command line portion of the tool. And then you will need to add the right command as a cron job. Without getting too complicated, the command to run Back In Time from the command line will be:

backintime -b

Which will back up any necessary job you have created.

With that in mind you can set up the backintime command to be run from your crontab. Say, for example, you want your backintime job to run every Sunday. You could enter a cronjob (started by issuing the command crontab -e) and enter a job like:

* * * * 7 /usr/bin/backintime -b

Save that cron job and it will be set up to run every Sunday.

Final thoughts

Back In Time is just as user-friendly as the other backup tools and adds a command line tool for added flexibility. I highly recommend Back In Time for your simple desktop backup jobs.

The script made use of the following tools: date, cat, tar, mv, and rm. That’s it. The script will create backups with the date in the file name and then move the backups to a central location. Without further adieu, let’s get to the script.

#! /bin/sh

TMP=”/tmp/”

#Format the date in YEAR-MO-DY format
TODAY=`date +%F`

# Check to see if there is a lastbackup file in /tmp, if not create it,
# if so then set LAST equal to $TODAY
if [ -f /tmp/lastbackup ]; then
LAST=`cat /tmp/lastbackup`
else
LAST=$TODAY
fi

# Set the web directory backup name to the following
WEB_FILENAME=”inc-”$TODAY”-web.tar.gz”

# Set database backup name to the following
DB_FILENAME=”inc-”$TODAY”-db.tar.gz”

# this tars up my web directory into web.tar.gz tarball.
/bin/tar -czf $TMP$WEB_FILENAME –after-date=$LAST /var/www/html

# Move the web back to the backup directory
/bin/mv $TMP$WEB_FILENAME /data

# Remove web backup file from temp director
rm $TMP$WEB_FILENAME

# this tars up my database directory into $TODAY-db.tar.gz tarball.
/bin/tar -czf $TMP$DB_FILENAME –after-date=$LAST /var/lib/mysql

# Move the backup database to the backup directory
/bin/mv $TMP$DB_FILENAME /data

# Remove web backup file from temp directory
rm $TMP$DB_FILENAME

What I wanted this to do is create daily backups and move the backups to the /data directory on the drive housing the server. These backups will be saved for one month. After the month is completed i have a second script that deletes the months backups prior to running the next backup (so there is always a backup to fall to). How I made use of this script is simple. I save the script (called backup.sh) in the root user directory and create a second script called rm_backups.sh that looks like this:

#! /bin/sh

rm /data/*gz

With these two files in place I create two cron entries. The first cron entry is for running the backup.sh script and looks like:

0 23 * * *     ~/backup.sh

The second cron entry is for running the rm_backups.sh script and looks like:

0 20 1 * *     ~/rm_backups.sh

Both of the above cron jobs are created as the root user.

Final Thoughts

Naturally this solution could be easily modified (using such tools rsync) to set up an offsite backup solution. What should be obvious is that creating a simple, flexible server backup system on Linux is easy. With the help of a little ingenuity, you can create your own automated backup service.

The cron system works by reading various crontab files either found in a users’ directory or within the /etc directory. These cron files can be edited with either the crontab command or by editing the various files within /etc. Only the root user can edit the /etc files because those files (found in the subdirectories /etc/cron.d, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.weekly, /etc/cron.monthly) are used for system services.  Instead of focusing on system services, I will illustrate how to automate the execution of a user-created bash script.

This imaginary bash script will be called myscript.sh. This script will be housed in /home/jlwallen/ and will have executable permission (by way of chmod u+x myscript.sh).  What we want to do is automate the execution of this script so that it executes once per day at the same time every day (we’ll say 7am).

Before we get into editing with crontab we first need to chat about how cron views time.The cron system looks at time like this:

• Minute(0-59)
• Hour (0-23)
• Day of the month (1-31)
• Month (1-12)
• Day of the week (0-6 with Sunday being 0)

The structure of cron time looks like this:

Minute Hour Day of month Month Day of the week

The trick for cron is that when you do not have an entry for a section you add an “*”. So the time entry for a cron job that should run at 7am every day of the week would look like:

0 7 * * *

That is not the complete cron entry, just the time portion. Now, on to editing with crontab.

Crontab

Users edit their cron entries with the crontab command. The crontab command has a few switches:

• e – Edit your crontab
• l – List your crontab
• r – Delete all crontab entries

To add a new crontab entry enter the command crontab -e which will place you in the vi text editor with your user crontab file opened. If you’re not familiar with vi I’ll give you the crash course as we edit the crontab.

First click the “i” key to go into the insert mode. You can now add text. Enter the cron entry to run the myscript.sh every day at 7am. This entry will look like:

* 7 * * * ~/myscript.sh

Now hit the Esc key to get out of the insert mode. Once out of insert mode you need to write the file and quite crontab. To do this hit the “:” key followed by “wq” (for write and quite). Finish the job by hitting the Enter key.

You should see “crontab: installing new crontab” at your bash prompt.

Congratulations, you’ve just created your first cron job!