I’m a backup nerd and like to back-up everything I do. Not just that, I like to version them too so I can go back in time to any point. git serves as a good tool for me for versioning wherever small data/text files etc are concerned and then I back this up with remote git servers like my own git server on a raspberry pi at home, a gitlab server and a github server.

The question that we will be answering today is: **Q2: **Cron? Using tar, making up the script file is enough command line for me. Isn’t there an easy way? Cron is a tool that can schedule any kind of tasks for you, and here we are using it to run our backup script automatically, so that we can concentrate on blogging. Now, most of us are phobic of anything that has anything to do with command line.

Last time, I had told you about how to reduce the backup size. Well, this is a short note further developing on the approaches discussed there. Basically, telling tar to backup only those files which have changed. For this, Linux has a command “find” which I am very fond of. You can give it a option “-newer” followed by a f”filename” and it will return the names of the files that are newer than filename.

Last week I had written a short guide on “Automating Website Backups”. I received some good comments/suggestions about it from Jasvinder through e-mail about other aspects that should be addressed. So, thought of doing a few follow ups to that post. This is done in more of a FAQ fashion, so as to answer some of the questions that may arise after reading the first post. Each post will answer one of the questions listed below in detail

What can go wrong with your wonderfully running website / blog? Everything.. Your online abode is so difficult to keep secured. It can get hacked, you may install something wrong, a wrong configuration can wreak havoc, the server hard disk might crash, natural calamities, and what not. Your best option to secure yourself against all this is summarized in just one word “BACKUP”. Now, a backup involves two most important things: “Database Backup” and “Files Backup”.