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Scheduling Mondo Rescue Backups With Cron

Background:

My initial expericence with scheduling Mondo Rescue backups of specific partitions to CD-RW media as a cron job was very positive and useful. Over the last several months though, an undetermined and intermittent problem arose and the backups were not being completed consistently or at all, even though the log file indicated that it was running as scheduled. Initially I thought there was a problem with the version(s) of Mondo and/or Mindi that I was using. My attempts to produce consistently good backups were failing until I came upon the following information.

Cron is a useful but somewhat eccentric tool. When I would test the scheduled Mondo Rescue backup cron job in Webmin, it always worked. So what was the problem? It finally became clear that while the cron job was starting, it was not completing. The following demonstrates how to set up the proper cron environment to allow Mondo to run through to completion.

The complete document can be found at: http://www.cod.utvinternet.com/documentation/mondo-with-cron/mondo-with-cron.html

Specifically, Section 5.2 demonstrates how to use the at command to generate the appropriate enviroment combined with the screen command to use as you cron script.

After applying this information I have found that my Mondo Rescue cron jobs run to completion without any problems.