cron-backup

What This Skill Does

The cron-backup skill provides a robust, automated framework for securing your data, code repositories, and configuration files. It leverages standard Linux cron job management to ensure that your backups occur reliably on a defined schedule. Beyond simple file copying, this skill features intelligent version-aware triggers, which monitor specific version files or command outputs, ensuring backups only occur when meaningful changes are detected, thus conserving storage space. The system includes a comprehensive suite of scripts for execution, automated cleanup, and auditing via listing tools. Backups are stored as compressed tar.gz archives using a standardized timestamp naming convention, making restoration simple and predictable. It is designed to handle common development environments by automatically excluding unnecessary noise like temporary files or dependency directories.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, use the OpenClaw repository installer:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/zfanmy/cron-backup

Ensure that your environment has sufficient read/write permissions for the target directories and access to the system cron daemon.

Use Cases

• Continuous Integration Preservation: Automatically trigger backups of your codebase whenever a new software version is detected.
• Workstation Hygiene: Regularly back up home directories or specific workspace folders to remote storage or mounted drives.
• Server Maintenance: Ensure system configurations are versioned and archived, with old entries purged after a set duration to maintain disk health.
• Regulatory Compliance: Automate periodic snapshots of user-generated data for retention policy adherence.

Example Prompts

1. "OpenClaw, please set up a daily backup for my project directory located at /home/user/code to /backup/code, and ensure we keep only the last 14 days of backups."
2. "Check my current system configuration and create a versioned backup; only save a new archive if the application version has updated from the last run."
3. "List all existing backups in my backup directory to ensure my cron jobs have been running successfully over the past week."

Tips & Limitations

• Permissions: Always verify that the user running the cron task has write access to the destination directory.
• Exclusions: Review the default ignore list in backup.sh to ensure you aren't accidentally excluding critical data or including unnecessary temp files.
• Storage Management: Use the cleanup script alongside your backup schedule to prevent disk overflow.
• Limitations: This skill relies on the system-level cron daemon. If the host machine is powered off during a scheduled window, the job will not run unless you have configured anacron or a similar catch-up mechanism.