PUZZLEMEDIUM

The Backup That Never Ran

The backup cron job "runs" every minute, but no files ever appear. Figure out why and make it work.

50 minutes
linux

Puzzle Overview

Operations swears the backup cron is configured. The crontab is there, the cron daemon is running, syslog shows cron firing the job. But the destination directory is empty and nobody has a backup from the last three days.

Several things are wrong at once. This is a real cron debugging exercise: environment, permissions, quoting, PATH, and error redirection all conspire against you.

Technologies Covered

linuxcrontroubleshootingscriptingpuzzle

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