Week 6 at a Glance
1) Read Chapter 6 - Linux Operations & Administration 1st Edition Authors: Nadine Basta, Dustin Finamore, Alfred Basta, Serge Palladino - Publisher: Cengage Learning
2) Watch a YouTube video Scheduling Tasks in Linux - The CRONTAB Command
3) Watch a second YouTube video Linux Backup and TAR and Cron Jobs If you liked the Eli video from a week two, here is another one directly on our topics of today. He does make a few small mistakes (e.g. no need to use sudo if you are backing up your own directory, and "p" is not needed to create the backup), but he is very clear.
Now we are getting into some system administration. The book teaches "tar" and "cpio." Oddly, for my own system, I don't use either. For each hard drive in my server, I have a seperate hard drive that keeps a copy. I use rsnapshot to make multiple backups (daillies, weeklies, and monthlies). I also have use removable drives that I rsync to make copies to.
Where I use tar often is for transfering files. In Linux, a ".tar.gz" (or .tar.bz2) file is functionally equivalent to a ".zip" file for Windows. The two are not identical (not can tar open a .zip file), but they are used for similar purposes.
The second topic is CRON. For my own systems, I have the system patch itself nightly:
0 3 * * * /bin/csh /home/root/sbin/install-sw.csh
And run backup script:
0 2* * * root/home/root/rsnapshot/backup-all.csh