Cronjob in cPanel

Question

I'd like to schedule a cronjob on my server to backup the entire public_html directory daily. I am logged into cPanel and I am on the Cron Job page where I have it set to run this command everyday at 2am: tar -vcf /site_backup.tar /public_html/

Is this command sufficient for what I want to do? I want to store the contents of public_html in the site_backup.tar that resides in the root directory (one level up from public_html). Do I need to provide anything else in the command for it to run correctly?

Answer 1

That command would serve its purpose but is there any reason you aren't using any compression like gzip or bzip? Also since this is in a cron I see no real reason to have the -v flag, no need to see the output.

Just add a -z to your command flags for gzip.

So your final command would be:

tar -zcf /site_backup.tar.gz /public_html/