Cron Job not completeing

[drezha]

Not sure if it's strictly programming but thought this was best place for it.

I've got a cron job that runs every Sunday morning to back up my documents but it doesn't complete. It only backs about 5Mb up before stopping.

I've got a file called DocBackup that has the following in.


* 5 * * 0 tar pzcvf /home/chris/Desktop/DocsBackup.tgz --exclude="/home/chris/Disc2/Documents/My Music" --exclude="/home/chris/Disc2/Documents/My Videos" /home/chris/Disc2/Documents

The command works when I use it in the terminal. I submitted the file to the cron list. Now when I type crontab -l I get the line above. Is there any reason why it doesn't finish?

Would like to wake up in the morning and just stick a CD in and burn the file off rather than having to redo the command in the terminal.

[dwblas]

It should mail any messages to /var/spool/mail/username for the default e-mail user you set up. See if you have something informative. My first thought was that you are using a normal user cron to back up files with root access only, but I have no way of confirming that. If that is the case you want to sudo crontab -e to setup your backup in root's cron.

[drezha]

Obviously I haven't setup a default email user because there's nothing there.

No, it's not got root only access. It's my documnets and thus I have permission to do all to them.

I've added
>/var/log/Docsbackup.log to the command so I'll have a log of it.

I've now also changed the cron for
0 5 * * 0 /home/chris/ShellScripts/DocsBackup >/var/log/Docsbackup.log

and the file it leads to is

#!/bin/sh

tar pzcvf /home/chris/Desktop/DocsBackup.tgz --exclude="/home/chris/Disc2/Documents/My Music" --exclude="/home/chris/Disc2/Documents/My Videos" /home/chris/Disc2/Documents

I've run the shell script seperatly and it works so I think tomorrow I may be all sorted :)

[dwblas]

Consider installing exim4 if you don't have any program to handle internal e-mail. It's very simple to set up. Then messages, including cron's, will be mailed to you.

[drezha]

Cheers.

I'll let what changes I've done to it run tonight and see if it works. Also see if it leavees a log file.

Otherwise I'll install exim then :)