CLI Support / Crontab

[philm001]

Hello,

I am using BiT v 1.4.1-1. I have it setup to run via the crontab. When I run the check-config command and it says that it installed on the crontab, But when I run the command crontab -e nothing is there.

[buhtz]

Hello Phillip,

Thank you for taking the time to report the bug and providing the details. I appreciate your feedback, will investigate the issue, and work on a solution to the best of my ability.

How do you "setup to run via the crontab"? You used the GUI? What is the title of your ticket about? There you use "CLI".

Please post the output of crontab -l.

There are several places where a crontab can be located. Please have a look at

1. /etc/crontab
2. /var/spool/cron/crontabs/
3. /etc/cron.d/

Best regards, Christian

[buhtz]

Hello Phillip, do you have any additional information about this issue for us? Otherwise I need to close the issue.

[buhtz]

Are you on an arch based distro? Please post the output of ps -A | grep -i cron.

[philm001]

Hello everyone, I apologize for going silent for so long. I haven't had a chance to respond and since the issue is closed, I would like to re-open this issue since I am still having this issue of implementing the auto back up.

Here is a link to the original issue: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/1721

Per the feedback, I have checked the following locations and noted their outputs below:

/etc/crontab

 /etc/crontab: system-wide crontab
 Unlike any other crontab you don't have to run the crontab
 command to install the new version when you edit this file
 and files in /etc/cron.d. These files also have username fields,
 that none of the other crontabs do.

SHELL=/bin/sh
 You can also override PATH, but by default, newer versions inherit it from the environment
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

 Example of job definition:
 .---------------- minute (0 - 59)
 |  .------------- hour (0 - 23)
 |  |  .---------- day of month (1 - 31)
 |  |  |  .------- month (1 - 12) OR jan,feb,mar,apr ...
 |  |  |  |  .---- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0 or 7) OR sun,mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat
 |  |  |  |  |
 *  *  *  *  * user-name command to be executed
17 *    * * *   root    cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6    * * *   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )
47 6    * * 7   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly )
52 6    1 * *   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly )

/var/spool/cron/crontabs/

Empty

/etc/cron.d/

Empty

Output from crontab -l

Back In Time system entry, this will be edited by the gui:
Please don't delete these two lines, or all custom backintime entries will be deleted next time you call the gui options!

The output of the command is as follows:

903 ?        00:00:00 cron
   3164 ?        00:00:00 cron
1526986 ?        00:00:00 nextcloud-cron

[philm001]

I am running the latest Ubuntu server LTS edition

[buhtz]

Can you explain your problem and what you try to achive please. It is not clear to me.

Your crontab is empty. Why do you expect that there should be an entry? How do you setup BIT scheduling?

[philm001]

Sure so this is a snippet from my profile. As you can see, I am attempting to setup daily backups at 1 AM in the morning

  GNU nano 6.2                                                                 /etc/backintime/config                                                                           
profile1.snapshots.automatic_backup_day=1
profile1.snapshots.automatic_backup_mode=20
profile1.snapshots.automatic_backup_time=0
profile1.snapshots.automatic_backup_weekday=7

And the cron tab is not updated to implement this. Is there some other command I need to run from CLI that will generate it?

[buhtz]

You edited this config file directly via nano?

This is not supported and you do this on your own risk. I assume somethings in your edit is not valid so BIT is not able to create a crontab entry for that profile. I suggest to install BIT with GUI on a virtual machine, create a similar profile and then compare the config files.

You could also check the debug output --debug.

Usually BIT re-crates the crontab entries on every start for all existing profiles. no need for an extra step.