How to migrate from manual crontabs to automatic scheduling?

If you already had crontabs set for Snaper, you have two options to move to automatic scheduling.

With agent mode, you do not manage crontabs at all anymore. The agent runs as a daemon and triggers your backups itself, based on the schedules you set on the dashboard. On install, it also cleans up any SNAPER MANAGED CRONTABS block it finds so you do not end up running each backup twice.

Three commands on the server:

snaper update
snaper agent install
snaper agent status

Then remove any remaining manual snaper entries from your crontab, and set the schedules from the dashboard.

Legacy: keep using crontabs

If you cannot (or do not want to) install the agent yet, you can still let Snaper manage crontabs for you:

  1. Remove the crontabs you had set by hand.
  2. Set the schedules from your dashboard — there is a dedicated button for it.

Automatic scheduling

Snaper will then write its own managed block in your crontab (see What is manage_crontab?).

Setting manage_crontab to false and keeping your hand-written crontabs is not recommended: you will not receive email alerts when a backup fails.