Category Archives: QNAP

QNAP & Cron – How To Persist A Reboot


QNAP makes a nice line of NAS machines. I had one that the power supply died on it after only a few weeks but other than that have never had an issue with any of them in service.

Not everything is so straight forward on them however, especially cron. If you have done any work on a Linux box you have encountered cron. Most people edit cron jobs using a web interface for their hosting company, but QNAP boxes are not hosting companies… You would probably try crontab -e to edit the list of jobs right?

Problem is, changes you make do not persist across reboots. A real pain-in-the-butt if you forget that and reboot to find out your jobs are not running like you thought they were.

The trick is you must directly edit /etc/config/crontab file, make your changes there and they will then persist across reboots OK.

QNAP has done a WIKI page about editing cron jobs on their website.