Select day for full backup

zoof · October 29, 2015, 12:59pm

Hi,

Is there some way to force MIAB to run the full backup on a weekend morning instead of a weekday morning? We’re up earlier on weekdays and on my VPS, a full backup this morning took 20 minutes. Incrementals take much less time.

Alternatively, rather than running it as a cron.daily job could it be run as a cron.d job, starting at say 3am when most people are sleeping?

Thanks!

JoshData · October 31, 2015, 11:57pm

No exactly, but see https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox/issues/577.

Moving it to cron.d so the time is more easily configurable makes total sense - we should do that. If you can submit a pull request to do that, even better. The thing is, the box doesn’t know what time zone it’s in (it’s usually configured for UTC, and if not should be), so we can’t know ahead of time what time will be best for the user.

zoof · November 2, 2015, 1:18am

So why is it that time should be configured as UTC? There appear to be a variety of opinions on the interweb with no clear consensus. I have been using localtime since my first server and have only run into problems because an ntp server I was syncing to disappeared.

If the box is configured as UTC, wouldn’t your setup script need to ask for the local time zone and store it in a configuration file somewhere?

I’m happy to try to put together a pull request – that would be my first ever. Which script configures /etc/cron.daily/mailinabox-backup?

JoshData · November 6, 2015, 12:01pm

I like consistency. Maybe that’s all.

If the box is configured as UTC, wouldn’t your setup script need to ask for the local time zone and store it in a configuration file somewhere?

Depends on what you’re thinking the next step is.

Which script configures /etc/cron.daily/mailinabox-backup?

github.com

mail-in-a-box/mailinabox/blob/main/setup/management.sh#L34


      
          # Create a virtualenv for the installation of Python 3 packages
          # used by the management daemon.
          inst_dir=/usr/local/lib/mailinabox
          mkdir -p $inst_dir
          venv=$inst_dir/env
          if [ ! -d $venv ]; then
          	# A bug specific to Ubuntu 22.04 and Python 3.10 requires
          	# forcing a virtualenv directory layout option (see #2335
          	# and https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/pull/2415). In
          	# our issue, reportedly installing python3-distutils didn't
          	# fix the problem.)
          	export DEB_PYTHON_INSTALL_LAYOUT='deb'
          	hide_output virtualenv -ppython3 $venv
          fi
          
          # Upgrade pip because the Ubuntu-packaged version is out of date.
          hide_output $venv/bin/pip install --upgrade pip
          
          # Install other Python 3 packages used by the management daemon.
          # The first line is the packages that Josh maintains himself!
          # NOTE: email_validator is repeated in setup/questions.sh, so please keep the versions synced.

zoof · November 6, 2015, 2:57pm

Submitted pull request to set back for 3:00am. TZ issue not decided yet.

JoshData · November 6, 2015, 3:43pm

Thanks! Let’s continue the discussion there. (It’ll take me some time to get to it.)