🛠 Why this?

✅ 1. Every techie deals with critical files — configs, notes, code, etc.

• Whether you're a developer, DevOps engineer, or sysadmin, you constantly work with important files:
  • Source code
  • Project documentation
  • .env files
  • Server config files (nginx.conf, my.cnf)
  • Shell scripts
• These files are often small but mission-critical — losing them or accidentally modifying them can break systems.
• With auto-backup.sh, you can create instant, compressed backups of those files/directories before making changes.

Example: Before editing /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, you run:

./auto-backup.sh /etc/nginx /backups

✅ 2. This teaches file handling, archiving, and automation

• It covers foundational Unix/Linux commands you will use over and over:
  • tar: for archiving
  • basename: to extract file/folder names
  • mkdir, if, test operators, date, echo, and logging
• Understanding how to manipulate files and folders via scripts is a core skill for automation, scripting, and DevOps tasks.
• It also teaches you how to write scripts defensively using checks, error codes, and logging — very important for production scripts.

✅ 3. Great intro to cron jobs for scheduled backups

• Once the script is working manually, you can automate it with cron — a real-world, professional skill.

Example cron job to run backup every night at 2 AM:

bash
CopyEdit
0 2 * * * /home/user/auto-backup.sh /home/user/projects /home/user/backups

This teaches:

• How to schedule tasks
• How to pass arguments to scripts in cron
• How to write logs for monitoring automated jobs