7.2. Introduction

Mondoarchive is designed to run interactively. That's not strictly true, if you run mondoarchive without the '-g' switch, it will just run. However, there is a problem where media changes are necessary. The user must change the media and tell mondoarchive that the change has been done. The problem lies in the fact that cron does not allow user interaction with a job. If you schedule a mondoarchive job via cron, you better be sure it needs only one media. In practical terms, this means using tapes or ISOs (if CD-R(W) is your backup medium). However, for tape users, there's always the possibility that the backup will overflow the tape while for CD-R(W) users, there is the added hassle of burning the ISOs in the morning. If your CD_R(W) backup routinely occupies more than one media, this is not for you (use the ISO option and burn the CDs in the morning). This HOWTO addresses the problem by using screen as a wrapper for mondo.