Why I moved the last cron jobs to systemd timers

Cron is fine until a job overlaps itself, fails silently, or needs to run after a missed window.

What timers give you

• Persistent=true runs a missed job after boot.
• A service unit cannot start twice, so overlap is impossible.
• Output lands in the journal with the unit name attached.
• RandomizedDelaySec spreads load across hosts.

[Timer]
OnCalendar=*-*-* 03:20:00
RandomizedDelaySec=15m
Persistent=true

The one annoyance

Two files per job. A small template unit with an instance name removes most of the repetition.

Check schedules with systemctl list-timers and test expressions with systemd-analyze calendar.