Rsync cron job won't work no matter what

[CrazyMaurice]

Hey all,

 

I'm trying to automate a backup from one server to another via SSH - I've got this working (mostly) pretty nicely when I just paste my rsync command in terminal:

 

rsync -avz --delete -e "ssh -i /root/.ssh/TODD-rsync-key" [email protected]:/mnt/user/SoundDesign/ /mnt/user/SoundDesign/

 

However when I try to create a cron job for this it isn't running:

01 00 * * * rsync -avz --delete -e "ssh -i /root/.ssh/TODD-rsync-key" [email protected]:/mnt/user/SoundDesign/ /mnt/user/SoundDesign/

Its in a file called backupSoundDesign.cron in boot\config\plugins\cronjobs. The file was created from terminal.

I ran update_cron and also restarted etc but I'm still not seeing new files in the destination after I get back the next day. 

 

Any thoughts? I must be missing something simple I imagine.

 

Cheers
Harry

[itimpi]

Have you checked whether the cron job is actually getting added to /etc/cron.d/root?   Also I think that when running under cron you need to specify the full path to rsync as you do not have the default environment set up to give you a search path.

 

i would have thought a better way to set this up would be via the User Scripts plugin?     That would handle setting it up in cron on your behalf.    It would also allow you to better test your script as you can try running it in foreground mode to check it is working as expected before scheduling it to run as a background job.

[CrazyMaurice]

Thank you so much for pointing me to this! I believe this solves the problem. I wasn't fully aware stuff needed to be added to /etc/cron.d/root. I've created a custom user script to run using the custom cron schedule. To check this should I just have a look in the /etc/cron.d/root directory?

 

Cheers

[itimpi]

19 minutes ago, CrazyMaurice said:

Thank you so much for pointing me to this! I believe this solves the problem. I wasn't fully aware stuff needed to be added to /etc/cron.d/root. I've created a custom user script to run using the custom cron schedule. To check this should I just have a look in the /etc/cron.d/root directory?

 

Cheers

The technique you mentioned should have resulted in entries in /etc/cron.d/root (the update_cron script is an Unraid specific one intended for use by plugins to avoid them ever editing /etc/cron.d/root directly).

 

if you are doing it via the User Scripts plugin then it sorts out the cron issues on your behalf.

[CrazyMaurice]

This could have been the problem. I'm also wondering if there's a permissions error as it actually won't let me go in that directory anyway.

 

Hopefully the plugin has it all sorted though!