Schedules

resticprofile is capable of managing scheduled backups for you. Under the hood it’s using:

• launchd on macOS X
• Task Scheduler on Windows
• systemd where available (Linux and other BSDs)
• crond as fallback (depends on the availability of a crontab binary)
• crontab files (low level, with (*) or without (-) user column)

On unixes (except macOS) resticprofile is using systemd if available and falls back to crond. On any OS a crond compatible scheduler can be used instead if configured in global / scheduler:

[global]
  scheduler = "crond"
  # scheduler = "crond:/usr/bin/crontab"
  # scheduler = "crontab:*:/etc/cron.d/resticprofile"
  # scheduler = "crontab:-:/var/spool/cron/crontabs/username"

---
global:
    scheduler: crond
    # scheduler: "crond:/usr/bin/crontab"
    # scheduler: "crontab:*:/etc/cron.d/resticprofile"
    # scheduler: "crontab:-:/var/spool/cron/crontabs/username"

"global" = {
  "scheduler" = "crond"
  # "scheduler" = "crond:/usr/bin/crontab"
  # "scheduler" = "crontab:*:/etc/cron.d/resticprofile"
  # "scheduler" = "crontab:-:/var/spool/cron/crontabs/username"
}

{
  "global": {
    "scheduler": "crond"
  }
}

See also reference / global section for options on how to configure the scheduler.

Each profile can be scheduled independently (groups are not available for scheduling yet - it will be available in version ‘2’ of the configuration file).

These 5 profile sections are accepting a schedule configuration:

• backup
• check
• forget (version 0.11.0)
• prune (version 0.11.0)
• copy (version 0.16.0)

which mean you can schedule backup, forget, prune, check and copy independently (I recommend using a local lock in this case).

retention schedule is deprecated

Starting from version 0.11.0, directly scheduling the retention section is deprecated: Use the forget section for direct schedule instead.

The retention section is designed to be associated with a backup section, not to be scheduled independently.