BackInTime, no Timely Snapshots

[limotux]

I have recently installed BackInTime, hoping to plug in my external USB HDD to “sanpshot” my /home folder over night or occasionally say every hour.

Taking manual snapshot is working fine, but it is not taking the snapshots it should take every n minutes or hours.

I contacted the developers at github and they tried to help but… no result yet.

Error messages are there in that thread!
Is it something related to my settings?
Anybody using BackInTime? How is it going?

(I installed it some time ago, the only difference I was on EXT4 but now I am on BTRFS, I don’t know if Baloo being disabled has anything to do with it).

Any feed back highly appreciated.

[dalto]

Is your cron enabled? systemctl status cronie

[limotux]

@dalto

systemctl status cronie

[limo@lenovo ~]$ systemctl status cronie
○ cronie.service - Periodic Command Scheduler
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/cronie.service; disabled; preset: disabled)
Active: inactive (dead)
[limo@lenovo ~]$

[dalto]

From the topic you linked it seems like they require a cron and yours isn’t running.

sudo systemctl enable --now cronie

[limotux]

@dalto

sudo systemctl enable --now cronie

Done!
I never thought it is not enabled by default or BackInTime should have automatically enabled it.

I will see how it goes.
I feel this is the point. (hopefully).
I will let you know how it goes!

[dalto]

@limotux

I never thought it is not enabled by default

On systemd-based distros, timers have mostly replaced the need for a cron so it wouldn’t be enabled by default here.

[limotux]

@dalto

timers have mostly replaced the need for a cron

I see… thank you!
It seems to be working because I noticed the icon of BackInTime just appeared on the tool bar. It never showed before!
Launching the app, it says “working” that seems it will snapshot now.
But I wonder why is it taking long time though there are previous snapshots. (maybe because this is the first snapshot with cron?)

UPDATE:
I have another profile backing snapshoting to the local SSD and there are actually snapshots every 5 minutes.

As usual, amazing @dalto and amazing forum and community.
You solved an issue I had in just a minute!

I really appreciate it @dalto
I love this community and EndeavourOS.

UPDATE:
Though it went fine in the secondary profile snapshotting to the local SSD, it is still “working” on snapshotting to the external USB HDD (NTFS).
I wonder why so slow.
I will wait and see!

[buhtz]

“Cronie” is not cron.

I have to ask again. Why are cron jobs not running no matter if “cronie” is active or not?

I want to know because we think about implementing a is-cron-activ-check in Back In Time.

@limotux: Can you please post the output of sudo ps -A | grep cron.

[limotux]

@buhtz

sudo ps -A | grep cron

First of all, welcome to this wonderful forum and distro.

[limo@lenovo ~]$ sudo ps -A | grep cron
[sudo] password for limo: 
    369 ?        00:00:00 crond
[limo@lenovo ~]$ 

Honestly I am not techie… I don’t know what is the difference between both.
Anyway I hope EndeavourOS and myself can help.

[dalto]

@buhtz

“Cronie” is not cron.

cronie is an implementation of crond. There is no cron installed by default here.

cronie is the most common way to get a cron service on Arch.