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liuyang's avatar
liuyang
Level 6
13 years ago

Backup schedule settings

Hi, my master and media servers are all NBU 7.1 on Windows 2008 R2 SP1. I have some questions regarding backup schedule in policy settings:

Currently we do monthly full (first Sat of the month), weekly full (every Sat of the month except the first Sat) and daily incr. I found the following problem:

Currently we use calendar based schedule. The start window for weekly/monthly is from 7pm Sat to 7am Sun. In calendar schedule, I select both Sat and Sun. However, I found some backups will run twice for weekly/monthly backups (one on Sat, one on Sun). If I select only Sat, some backups will failed with status 196 (backup window closed). In this case, I want to try frequency based backup, but I found it does not have settings for monthly backups. It is only available in hours, days and weeks.

So how should I configure the schedules? Thanks in advance.

 

  • OK, think this should work ...

    You specifiy the days you want te backup to run in the calendar scheduling windows,  for example I set mine to the last saturday of the month.

    Next, I set set the backup window for 06.00 - 12.00 on both Sat and Sun, and select 'retry after runday', in the policy attributes screen.

    Therefore, if the backup fails to finish on the Sat, it should retry in the open backup window on the Sun.

     

     

     Calendar sched: Enabled
          Allowed to retry after run day
          Saturday, Week 5
        Residence is Storage Lifecycle Policy:         0
        Schedule indexing:     1
        Daily Windows:
              Sunday     06:00:00  -->  Sunday     12:00:00
              Saturday   06:00:00  -->  Saturday   12:00:00
     
    Martin
  • We use a mix of Frequency and calendar in the same policy, even though the manual says that it is not a good idea.

    Daily: Frequency
    Weekly: Frequency
    Monthly: Calendar

    A number of us are doing this, e.g:

    https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/calendar-or-frequency#comment-5540731
    (The blog that is referred to can now be found here: https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/netbackup-frequency-based-scheduling-1 )

    https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/netbackup-and-monthly-backups

    https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/calendar-amp-frequency-scheduling

     

     

  • Thanks a lot for your answers. I have some more questions regarding the schedule settings:

    1) For daily backups, we have volume pools for different day (e.g., Monday Pool, Tuesday Pool and so on). So in the policy, I have Monday schedule (7pm Mon to 7am Tues), Tuesday schdule (7pm Tues to 7am Wed)... Currently I use calendar based schedule. If I change to frequency based schedule, shall I set the frequency to be 1 week or 1 day for each of these schedules?

     

    2) Our schedule is 7pm to 7am. E.g., weekly full backup is 7pm Sat to 7am Sun. In calendar schedule, I select Sat only. However, due to resource limitation, some backups may wait util Sun (e.g., 1am Sun) to run. In this case, will these backups fail as I do not select Sun in calendar schedule? If a backup completes before Sun 12am, will it run again on Sun since the window ends at 7am Sun?

     

    Thanks in advance.

  • I have previously shared my feelings about 'micro-managing' media. My feeling is that it is totally unecessary when NBU is managing media. I will therefore decline any further comments.

  • Martin is pretty much there with his thoughts ...

    What you have to remember is that calendar based is done on a day that starts and ends at midnight.

    So what looks like a single window of 7pm sat to 7pm sun is actually tow different days and so 2 different windows (7pm to midnight sat and midnight to 7pm sun)

    If you can fit it into your available backup window you are best to do it as follows:

    Daily - frequency based as you are doing

    Weekly - 1st Sunday of the month 0010 to 2350

    Monthly - all other Sunbdays 0010 to 2350

    Spanning the days and using "retires allowed" is fine until one fails all weekend, you fix it, and then find that it actually does the Monthly the next weekend as a result

    I totally agree with Marianne about media hadling - as far as volume pools go less is better

    Hope this helps