Crontab step-by-step help needed

backing up or emailing a file

[davighi]

Yesterday I lost the one essential file on my server. And yes I hadn't backed it up for three weeks. After much grovelling to my host administrator he reinstated it from their back up copy, phew!

He suggested I set up a cron job to back up or email this file each night.

Can anyone help with a step-by-step guide? example crontab files, etc. As you can probably tell I know very little about this.

[marcs]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

If the file is a simple text file, a simple crontab entry will do :

0 0 * * * mail you@your_email.com < /path/to/your/file

That would email the file to you each day at midnight.

This would not work for binary files, if memory serves.

[dingman]

for binary files, you could try:

0 0 * * * mpack -s "subject-line" -m 0 /path/to/your/file you@your_email.com

quick testing shows that works on one of my systems. Of course, you have to have mpack installed on the server, and it's not quite as ubiquitous as 'mail'.

[littleman]

Air did a great HOWTO a couple of years ago:
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