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I'm using Déjà Dup to backup my disks into a cloud disk, but it's not accessible 24/7 (long story). When it tries to connect and it's not accessible, Déjà Dup gives an error, and in the next time it cannot connect again (I suppose the file system disables this cloud disk).

Is there a way to setup on which time Déjà Dup makes the automatic backup? Where are the cron job files/tasks? May I changed them manually?

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1 Answers1

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First: Typing deja-dub --backup in a terminal starts backing up immediately.

Second: Open up a terminal and type crontab -e, press enter and then type 2 to select the nano editor. Enter again and now you have text something like;

# Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron.
#
# Each task to run has to be defined through a single line
# indicating with different fields when the task will be run
# and what command to run for the task
#
# To define the time you can provide concrete values for
# minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon),
# and day of week (dow) or use '*' in these fields (for 'any').#
# Notice that tasks will be started based on the cron's system
# daemon's notion of time and timezones.
#
# Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through
# email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected).
#
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
#
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h  dom mon dow   command

So far I understand should following command 0 12 * * * deja-dup --backup written without the # at start, start the backup at 12 a.m (I suppose a 24h system here).

More examples:

5 12 * * * deja-dup --backup: Start backup at 12:05 a.m
* 12 5 * * deja-dup --backup: Start backup 5th of every month at 12 a.m
* 6 * 2 * deja-dup --backup: Start backup at 6 a.m in Frebruary


Refer to this askubuntu question to have a better idea about cron jobs in ubuntu

  • therefore should I turn off automatic backups in Déjà Up and rely only in cron jobs? – João Pimentel Ferreira Feb 13 '18 at 21:20
  • yes, but you don't have to. You should do it of course, because the automatic backup function isn't needed for cron jobs That is they are made for, to automate things independly –  Feb 13 '18 at 23:06