I rely heavily on cron job on my server to perform backups. I copy the backups to an offline location every day and keep a daily backup of past 30 days at any given time. These are my cron jobs that run in this order daily at a separation of 1h 1min.

  1. nice tar cfz /home/ekvastra/backup/wiki.ekvastra.in-`date -I`.tar.gz /home/ekvastra/wiki.ekvastra.in >/dev/null 2>&1
  2. nice tar cf /home/ekvastra/backup/podcast.ekvastra.in-`date -I`.tar /home/ekvastra/podcast.ekvastra.in >/dev/null 2>&1
  3. mysqldump -hXQZ -P123 -pMNO -uABC XYZ -r /home/ekvastra/backup/ekvastra_txtp733-`date -I`.sql >/dev/null 2>&1
  4. nice tar cfz /home/ekvastra/backup/notes.ekvastra.in-`date -I`.tar.gz /home/ekvastra/notes.ekvastra.in >/dev/null 2>&1
  5. find /home/ekvastra/backup -maxdepth 1 -mtime +20 -type f
  6. find /home/ekvastra -name error_log -mtime 0 -type f -printf \%T+\\t\%s\\t\%p\\n
  7. find /home/ekvastra -type d \( -name tmp -o -name .trash -o -name cache -o -name backup -o -name session -o -name caches -o -name logs -o -name mail \) -prune -o -mtime 0 -type f -printf \%T+\\t\%s\\t\%p\\n
  8. nice tar cfz /home/ekvastra/backup/public_html-`date -I`.tar.gz /home/ekvastra/public_html >/dev/null 2>&1
  9. /usr/local/bin/php /home/ekvastra/wiki.ekvastra.in/bin/indexer.php >/dev/null 2>&1
  10. nice tar cfz /home/ekvastra/backup/bb.ekvastra.in-`date -I`.tar.gz /home/ekvastra/bb.ekvastra.in >/dev/null 2>&1
  11. nice tar cfz /home/ekvastra/backup/notepad.ekvastra.in-`date -I`.tar.gz /home/ekvastra/notepad.ekvastra.in >/dev/null 2>&1
  12. nice tar cfz /home/ekvastra/backup/kandhamal.org-`date -I`.tar.gz /home/ekvastra/kandhamal.org >/dev/null 2>&1

Only some generate email, other Cron jobs do not generate emails.