Retry Only Failed Resources in Backup Job with Backup Exec™ 20.3
Administrators usually have SLAs to protect all the important resources and have a restore point in time ready. Backup job can be configured to backup several resources in the same job. When such job is successful for some of the resources and fails for some, the latest recovery point is available only for the resources for which job succeeded. For example, a job backed up 10 out of 12 virtual machines and failed for 2 virtual machines. In such scenario, the administrator has the following options:
- Rerun the entire failed job:
- This takes a lot of unnecessary time and space since resources already backed up are backed up again.
- Create a new job only for failed resources
- Job creation, configuration takes a lot of time.
Introducing 'Retry Only Failed Resources' option
Backup Exec™ 20.3 introduces a new option to ‘Retry Only Failed Resources’, which addresses this problem by giving you an option to run a failed job for only the failed resources. When this option is selected, the job will run for only the resources which failed in the previous run of the job.
This option can be selected by doing right-click and select ‘Retry only failed resources’ in the Backup Exec console. The option is available in all places where ‘Run now’ option is present.
This option is available for backup jobs. This option is enabled only when the most recent run of the job has failed. Backup Exec checks the latest run of the job, whether full backup or incremental / differential backup for failure and the option is enabled.
Job logs provides information about the resources which are skipped in the job. These resources were successful in the previous run of the job.
Simplified Disaster Recovery’ / ‘System State Protection’ Enabled Jobs
If System State Protection is enabled for a backup job, the ‘Retry Only Failed Resources’ option considers all the critical resources. It does not skip the critical resources even if they were successfully backed up in the job which failed for some other resources. This allows Simplified Disaster Recovery at the point in time for the retried job.
This option is not designed to work as a replacement for the ‘Check Point Restart’ feature. Check Point Restart allows to restart from the point of the failure, at a file level granularity. For example, if NTFS volume E: had 100 files, and backup failed after backing up 50 files, Check Point Restart allows the next run of the job to start backing up from the failed file, that is the 50th file. If a job had D: and E:, and the backup failed for E: but was successful for D:, then ‘Retry only failed resources’ would backup E: entirely (depending on the backup method of the job) but skip D:. Inside the failed resource, ‘Retry only failed resources’ job does not start from the failed file.
‘Retry Only Failed Resources’ is a perfect example of our customer focus and commitment, because this option was requested by customers.
If you are not a current Backup Exec customer, we invite you to learn more about the solution at the following link: www.backupexec.com