Working with Systemd Timers

The other day I thought to myself that it would be a good idea to have some backups of my data. So I was wondering, how would I execute a periodic backup task? Most of you are probably familiar with cron . cron is a Unix utility to run scheduled tasks. There is a file called crontab which you edit by issuing crontab -e command, and inside schedule tasks such as: 0 1 * * * /home/skwee357/backup.sh The first 5 entries are what is known as a cron expression, and they dictate when the command will be executed. In the above example, the expression says “every day at 1 am”. There is a cool website called crontab.guru which allows you to compose various cron expressions. After the cron expression, we have the actual script to execute. This can be a bash script, or a binary like curl . Cron is easy, very simple and robust mechanism to execute periodic tasks on a *nix server, and is available by default on all popular Linux distributions. However, cron suffers from some issues: If the syst ... Read full article.