Quote from: Abrosim Adderiy on April 22, 2013, 08:47:04 AM

What would be the best way to start writing a script to automatically run a bitcoind server on an Ubuntu startup, make regular backups and restart from a backup on error. Would this normally be done through a cron job?

I use pretty much the same sort of setup on windows.
I know the drivers crash occasionally, so I have a sheduled task setup to reboot the machine every 24 hours.
at reboot, I just start the miner & off we go!

this could be easily accomplished with a cronjob in ubuntu as well... the 'on error' part may prove a bit difficult.
if you're experianced in this sort of stuff, you could try to write a (shell) script that polls the miners' API (if your miner supports it)
and check for reduced hash rate for example.