[dvlug] Mailing list backups

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Robert Wall (robertlikesturtles at gmail.com):

> Before the dvlug list went down, there was some discussion of backing up
> the mbox file for the mailing list. The cron command I mentioned at the
> time had a couple of problems, and it took me a while to tweak it
> properly, so I figured I'd give an update in case anyone else plans on
> backing up through cron. Here's what my crontab line is now:
> 
> date -u +\%s

Hmm, seconds since the Unix epoch does have the advantage of uniqueness 
(as long as you don't make more than one backup per second).  ;->

FWIW, I'm still lastingly fond of "date +%F" (for files created no more
than once per day).  But any solution is miles better than none, and
Lesson Zero of system administration is that the perfect tends to be
enemy to the good.  (I.e., there's a tendency to put off tasks until you
can do them properly, with the unfortunate result of them not getting
done even poorly.)

> * Note that the above will make a new file every day, and doesn't delete
> old backups. I guess that could be a problem if you have limited disk
> space.

logrotate?