Help with cron job for backups

Question

Help with cron job for backups

I'd like to shut down my mail server every morning at 2:00AM so I can run MAILBFR to backup to an external fw drive and then start the mail server again. *deep breath*

My problem is, how? I've read the Command Line.pdf but the section on cron isn't helpful. It seems that cron runs commands at a specified time but I have no way of determining exactly when to restart the mail server once mailbfr is done backing up. Ideally, I'd like to have a way to fire off each command as soon as the last was done. Kind of like an MSDOS batch file.

Could someone help me out with a step by step way of doing this for my server?

Dual G4/G5 XServes - Dual G5 Powermac, Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Posted on Jun 30, 2006 10:24 AM

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Answer 1

pterobyte

Level 6

11,104 points

Jun 30, 2006 11:13 AM in response to Community User

Run "mailbfr -i" and follow instructions.

Alex

P.S. mailbfr does stop and start mail services for you when needed.

P.P.S. mailbfr comes with documentation 😉 😉

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Answer 2

UptimeJeff

Level 4

3,479 points

Jul 1, 2006 6:09 PM in response to Community User

The following is a single line (may get wrapped in this forum) which you can add to /etc/crontab to execute a backup nightly (with stop/start standard part of mailbfr). It also appends output to system.log, if you don't care about that then delete the >> and everything to the right of it. The 'mailbackup' should be a complete path to an existing folder where you wish the backup to be directed.

0 2 * * * root /usr/sbin/mailbfr -b /mailbackup/ >> /private/var/log/system.log

This would execute the script at 2:00am every day.
Your crontab may already have an entry (depending on install), so follow it's format. The 0 2 * * * can be seperate with any number of spaces or tab(s).

Jeff

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