(ana)cron question

["William A. Mahaffey III" <wam%hiwaay.net@localhost>]

I have several boxen on my LAN, all running some form of linux or *BSD. 
I want some of them to backup configuration files and/or /etc and/or the 
whole root fs for themselves & other LAN boxen periodically, probably 
weekly. I poked around on my NetBSD 6.1.5 server & have a question. It 
looks like I want root to do the backing up so as to have access to all 
the stuff under /etc or / on whatever box is getting backed up. That box 
apparently uses cron as root to take care of that for the system. I see 
that the root crontab accesses (possibly up to) 3 files in /etc to 
schedule tasks. I want to add to what it is doing, in a fashion which 
doesn't interfere w/ system operations & gets preserved across OS 
upgrades. I kinda expected some sort of crontab.local (following 
rc.local), but no such capability seems to exist. How do I go about 
scheduling these backups for the various machines which will be doing 
the backing-up, starting w/ the NetBSD box ? I am planning to schedule 
rsync's to do the actual backing up, I just need to figure out how to 
interleave that job w/ other stuff the OS is doing on its own, w/o 
interfering w/ whatever else is going on. If I knew where the root 
crontab info came from, I guess I could add to it, but I haven't located 
it yet. TIA for any pointers & have a good one.


--

	William A. Mahaffey III

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	"The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
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