DietPi-backup changing the time in cron

[jalsco]

Can you please confirm about this -

My understanding is - if I set dietpi-backup as "DAILY" in the UI - then it is included in the dietpi cron script. I do not know exactly what time that is set to run....

But if I DO NOT want to change the behavior of the whole dietpi script in cron - because there seems like a lot else in there, not just dietpi-backup.... But I DO want to be specific about exactly "when" ( time and other frequency settings ) that dietpi-backup runs... So that means I should set "DAILYBACKUPS" to NO in the dietpi-backup UI ... and then just create my own cron entries ..

Seems like no other way to set the TIME that backup runs. Is it true ? either (1) change time of the whole dietpi job OR (2) own cron job(s) to run dietpi-backup with "NO" to daily in the UI.....

Did I understand it right ?

[MichaIng]

Yes, dietpi-backup uses the daily cron job for daily backup. You can see the execution code in /etc/cron.daily/dietpi.

You can see and adjust the daily cron job execution time via dietpi-cron. This is safe to do, nothing is expecting or requiring a specific time for any of those hourly/daily/weekly/monthly cron jobs. The only measure is that you wouldn't want it to disturb you when you're working on the system, so you'd want the daily job to run while you are usually at sleep 🙂. And to not run everything the same minute, you'd want to start hourly, daily, weekly and monthly cron jobs with a few minutes between them. But even all at once does not generally cause issues.

Of course you can also run /boot/dietpi/dietpi-backup 1 with an own cron job, but I see no reason why one would do that.

[jalsco]

i did not realize there was some ui menus dietpi-cron
Now knowing that, I will let the dietpi system manage all that... But probably - also - I will take a dd image backup of the boot partition in my own cron job - probably only weekly. .. thanks again for your responsiveness.

[MichaIng]

i did not realize there was some ui menus dietpi-cron

Still something to discover 😃. It does btw nothing else than adjusting /etc/crontab, which is the responsible for these /etc/cron.* script drop directories on Linux systems in general.

Indeed, a full dd disk backup is a good thing by times, in case the system doesn't boot anymore at all.

[Joulinar]

an overview of our tools is available at https://dietpi.com/docs/dietpi_tools/