[Gllug] Running TAR backup through Root's Cron

[Alistair Mann]

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Thus spaketh Steven Bellamy on Thursday 15 May 2003 11:53 am:
> Hi,
>
> I'm having a problem running a backup through Cron.
> I've created a very simple backup script (using TAR and Crontab for the
> user Root) to run backups at 01h00 everyday to backup a Squid Proxy Server
> in a remote office.

Does this mean the tar is on a different machine to the filesystem it is 
backing up? If so, consider if a timeout is occuring.

> The problem is that the backup only seems to backup about 140MB of data and
> then stops, if I run the same script from the shell (as root), it backs up
> the entire server.
> I have looked through the cron logs and syslogs but can't find any error
> messages.
>
> Anyone have any suggestions?

It would help if you posted the tar command you're using. On non critical 
machines, I normally use:

tar jcvfp archive.bz2 --exclude-from='file' /path/to/root/dir

On more critical machines, I would do:

find <source dir> -type f | grep -v <exceptions> | cpio -moca | bzip2 -c \ 
>archive.bz2

For several reasons: first, find and grep are more choosy about what they copy 
that tar (pipes are the worst). Second, cpio has a CRC check in it that tar 
doesn't: that gives extra notice of problems, thought admittedly it does 
nothing more to help recover that bad archive.

Cheers,
- -- 
Alistai
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