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?
Cron already exists and is established as the solution in this space. It’s also used as the model for a lot of other timer services outside the Linux kernel.
cron is quite inadequate for condition based scheduling. Instead of million obscure ways to achieve this inside the command that cron executes, systemd timers give us a standard ONE way to do things.
I feel like systemd timers follow unix philosophy better than cron at this day and age.
Have you read the article? The fourth paragraph lists improvements systemd timers bring over cron:
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 system is down when the cron needs to run, the cron will be missed
There is no built-in status monitoring
There are no built-in logs
If you want to execute pre/post commands (for example by pinging an external service for success/failure) you have to do it inside the script itself
All of these issues are addressed with systemd services and timers, as the authors explains in details.
Cron already exists and is established as the solution in this space. It’s also used as the model for a lot of other timer services outside the Linux kernel.
cron is quite inadequate for condition based scheduling. Instead of million obscure ways to achieve this inside the command that cron executes, systemd timers give us a standard ONE way to do things.
I feel like systemd timers follow unix philosophy better than cron at this day and age.
Have you read the article? The fourth paragraph lists improvements systemd timers bring over cron:
All of these issues are addressed with systemd services and timers, as the authors explains in details.