Does anyone know how to make RSnapshot's cron file stick

So we recently had a scare where my RAID5 superblock up & disappeared last weekend (thank you modprobe raid5 command for existing, you saved my life!). Now my wife is a graphic designer & had recently done tons of work that she needed access to. So I grabbed my external incremental backup drive, figuring it would have her latest work on it only to find it hadn't been updated since october.

It turns out that whenever RSnapshot updates, it overwrites the cron file & removes my preferred backup times. Which was a problem because my NAS did a powerdown cycle every night for 6 hours.

So as a workaround - because data integrity matters more than drive longevity - I've switched to a 2 hour standby command rather than a power down & the backups are happening normally. I also paid for backblaze & set up a duplicati job.

I'd prefer to have my cake & eat it, too, though. Is there any way to lock down the RSnapshot cron file to save myself this headache?

Thanks in advance!

Yeah, when I said "Oh, have you done anything important since November?" I was not the most popular person in the house. & it's just the two of us.

I think I set it up properly. The setup is pretty straightforward. Nanoed into the cron file, edited the scheduling, saved it. RSnapshot would back everything up properly for months & then eventually I realized it's stopped the backups & when I check the cron file it's back to 3, 3:30 am.

I guess write-protecting the cron file is the smartest way to do it. Off to the tutorials! Like you said, worst case the update fails - what is it gonna stop backing files up? Thanks!

Turns out changing a source folder will also revert the cron file - figures it out cuz I’d defined the wrong sources & I tried to change them after already having setup write protection. This solution actually works really well cuz it forces me to think of the cron file if I ever need to change anything

Thanks for the clarification.

I spin everything down because I want to avoid wear & tear on all the components. I’ve read different things about hard drive longevity & I decided it made sense to power down to give the whole server a break daily.

I’m running OMV4 so the write-protect option on /etc/cron.d/openmediavault-rsnapshot makes the most sense.

Thanks for contextualizing & for the info about OMV5 should I decide to upgrade.

I should add if I didn’t give the server a break my in-laws would run Plex until 3-4 am every morning, the shutdown kind of puts a hard cap on the constant reads