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I want to run a backup script 10 minutes after booting up my machine but only once a day. Is it possible to build up such scenarios with systemd?

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I don't fully understand your requirements, please clarify. I understand that if you reboot your machine serveral times in a day, the script should only run after first reboot, is that right? If your machine runs for more than 1 day long, should the script be run in consecutive days? – Krzysztof Adamski Sep 14 '12 at 18:29
Exactly. I will make a backup every day no matter how often I reboot my PC. – Fu86 Sep 14 '12 at 22:42
4  
If you're not hung up on systemd, this is exactly what anacron is for. – Gilles Sep 14 '12 at 23:48
I may be wrong but there's no easy way to set anacron to run script only 10 minutes after boot is complete. – Krzysztof Adamski Sep 15 '12 at 9:16

2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

See: /lib/systemd/system/systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer:

[Timer]
OnBootSec=15min
OnUnitActiveSec=1d

This runs the corresponding .service file 15 minutes after boot and then every day while the system is up. If you reboot multiple times in the same day, you can just have the backup script check the mtime of the archive and skip that run if it's less than a day old.

Also, if your backups are going to be heavy on IO, it might be helpful to read about the IOScheduling* directives in the systemd.exec(5) manpage.

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up vote 3 down vote

I don't think it's possible to do this entirely in systemd as it does not track any state between reboots. You can easly schedule something to run 10 minutes after boot using systemd.timer and its OnBootSec= or OnStartupSec=.

The script itself has to check if it was already run today or not. This can be easily implemented even in bash, for example:

#/bin/sh -x
FILE=/etc/lastrun
TODAY=`date +"%Y%m%d"`
LASTRUN=`cat $FILE`

[[ -z "$LASTRUN" ]] || [[ "$TODAY" -gt "$LASTRUN" ]] || exit
echo $TODAY > $FILE
RUNYOURSCRIPTHERE
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