Configuring Backup Schedule in Netbackup 7.6

I'll chip in too... and I'm with Marianne on this... I've not had a problem mixing frequency and calendar schedules... (but once you understand how it works - you can see why some poeple say not to mix...) - but then I've only ever mixed them with straightforward scheduling - along the lines of frequency based for daily differentials, and calendar based for weekly (and/or) monthly full.

For example, if I have a 'backup window' of 10 hours each weekday night (Mon - Thu) of 20:00 to 06:00 next morning, then I set the frequency of the daily differential schedules to 11 hours.  Which avoids schedule creep, and also means that if you manually re-run the differential schedule during the day, then it will still run 11 hours later - which may occur in the morning, but at least it will queue (and so should run).

And then have weekly calendar based full schedules, on 2nd/3rd/4th/last Friday of the month, to take a full from Friday 20:00, with a long 'backup window' until 06:00 Monday morning, with 'Retries allowed after runday'.  And then monthly full schedule, same run window, retries allowed after runday, on the 1st Friday of the month.

I've never seen a config like this fail (since v5.1).  Even if we have de-activated the policy on a Friday afternoon, to allow for scheduled maintenance on Saturday - and then re-activated the policy late on a Saturday - NetBackup takes the retries allowed after runday into account and still runs the correct weekly full or monthly full schedule.

However, with such a scenario, one would have to make it clear to the business that monthly full backups (long term retention - probably duplicated to tape) - are only taken on the first Friday of the month, i.e. after business month-end processes have completed.

But you can mix up the week numbers on the weekly and monthly schedules, e.g. I have also configured daily frequency schedules as above - but with weekly full on the 1st/2nd/3rd/4th and monthly full on the 'last' (for customers that wanted their monthly full in the last week of the month) - and never had a problem with that either - because NetBackup knows to run the least frequently run (an unfortunate term here - as, in this example, we're using calendar based not frequency based) schedule.  i.e. NetBackup knows to run the monthly full on the 'last' Friday of a four week month because it hasn't been run for four weeks.

HTH.