I have recently done some maintenance on my mother’s PC which runs Ubuntu Linux. It had stopped working, but luckily it was a dead motherboard and the hard drive was OK, so her important files where not lost. (There was no backup).
Question is, how to schedule backups given that this PC gets turned off when it is not in use? I am thinking it might be possible to schedule a script that will start a few minutes after boot, and then hope that the backup finishes before the PC gets turned off.
I have found an article on stack overflow about how to create an upstart job that runs on boot, but I don’t fully understand the details, or how to make it wait for several minutes before it runs. I am also worried about how to make it robust enough to survive if my mum cuts the power before the backup completes.
Can anyone offer some advice or tips? Apart from being reliable, the most important thing is that it must run unattended without intervention, and be self healing. Anything that relies on me or my mum to remember to run the backup, or unlock the repo will likely get forgotten.