Understanding cron schedules
How to write cron expressions for your backup schedule.
4 min read·🕐 Scheduling
VPS Snaps uses standard 5-field cron expressions for backup schedules. All times are UTC.
Cron field reference
# ┌─ minute (0-59)
# │ ┌─ hour (0-23)
# │ │ ┌─ day of month (1-31)
# │ │ │ ┌─ month (1-12)
# │ │ │ │ ┌─ day of week (0-7, 0 and 7 = Sunday)
# │ │ │ │ │
* * * * *Common schedules
0 2 * * * # Daily at 2:00 AM UTC
0 2 * * 0 # Weekly on Sunday at 2:00 AM UTC
0 2 1 * * # Monthly on the 1st at 2:00 AM UTC
0 */6 * * * # Every 6 hours
30 1 * * 1-5 # Weekdays at 1:30 AM UTCHourly backups
Schedules with a frequency shorter than 24 hours require a Pro plan or higher. If you're on Starter and set an hourly schedule, the job will be created but will only run once per day.
All schedule times are UTC. If your team works in US Eastern time (UTC-5), '2:00 AM UTC' is '9:00 PM Eastern'. Plan accordingly to avoid backups during peak traffic hours.
Staggering jobs
If you have multiple backup jobs, stagger them by 15-30 minutes to avoid all jobs hammering your server and storage at the same time.
A good pattern: databases at :00, Docker at :15, VPS snapshots at :30.