Easily Use Cron to Backup Thunderbird eMail in Ubuntu Linux

Mar 6, 2008 by Roger Wheatley

Continuing on from yesterday’s email adventure: Thunderbird Has Lost my eMail in Ubuntu! a prudent preventive measure (I suggested later in the day) is to make sure you always have a current backup of email! There are a few of ways this can be simply handled:

1) Manually copying (duplicating) the “/.mozilla-thunderbird<The Account Profile Name” directory to another location. Not the most realistic solution, or at least not for me because I’ll never do it on a regular schedule.

2) Using software solutions. For example “Bacula” comes to mind: “…Bacula is a set of computer programs that permit you (or the system administrator) to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds…”

3) Use a simple cron job to automate the backups. One of the forum contributors (Geoff) at http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?s=&showtopic=59642&view=findpost&p=243567 provides a nifty, helpful script here:

#!/bin/sh
## Script to backup Thunderbird email
## Backup needs a date (stamp)
set -x
x=`date +%y%m%d.%H%M`
## Save space by making sure backup is archived
tar zcf thunderb-mail-${x}.tgz ~roger/.thunderbird
## Save the compressed backup to mybackup folder
cp thunderb-mail-${x}.tgz /joe/backups/
## Clean up after, we don't need two copies of the backup
rm ~/thunderb-mail-${x}.tgz

Edit the code in his original post, or the code above to your needs. (In other words, where you see “joe” change that word to your account name). For those not overly familiar with cron job configuration, you can find a synopsis here: CronHowto

To run the cron job in our solution we can do the following:

In your Ubuntu distribution, surf to the /usr/bin/ directory and create a folder called “cron_scripts” (or whatever other name is meaningful to you). Place your new script (let’s call it “tb_email_backup”) in cron_scripts. The full path to the script should be:

/usr/bin/cron_scripts/tb_email_backup

To set up the actual cron (tab) job, enter the following command in a terminal:

crontab -e

vi or nano will open for editing.

The syntax to tell cron when to run that backup script (tb_email_backup) and how often looks like this:

* * * * * command to be executed

The first (from left to right) “*” specifies: Minute
The second “*” specifies: Hour
The third “*” specifies: Day
The fourth “*” specifies: Month
The fifth “*” specifies: Week

In this example, we want the backup to be made at 09:30 hrs every day. The command would be:

30 9 * * * /usr/bin/cron_scripts/tb_email_backup

Note: If you don’t want cron job messages, just place “>>/dev/null 2>&1″ to the end of your command.

For more cron help, there’s another good resource here:  http://www.linuxhelp.net/guides/cron/

Hopefully this will help yesterday’s “issue”, I’m still waiting for him to tell me how it worked out.

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