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How can I alternate full and incremental backups?

sclind
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Currently I have a policy where I run a full backup three days a week and an incremental four days a week (the days are hardcoded in the schedules).

I tried setting up a test policy with the full backup to run every 2 days at 10 am.  And then I also defined a incremental schedule to run every 2 days at 10 am.   When the policy ran for the first time (yesterday) it ran the full backup (as expected).

I hoped to see that the incremental schedule would have then run today but it didnt.

Anyone have any ideas on how to alternate full and incrementals every other day?

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RiaanBadenhorst
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Why dont you use calendar?

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44 REPLIES 44

RiaanBadenhorst
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bppllist "policy name" -U

sclind
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 bppllist "STD_ALTERNATE_FULL_INCR" -U
------------------------------------------------------------

Policy Name:       STD_ALTERNATE_FULL_INCR

  Policy Type:         MS-Windows
  Active:              yes
  Effective date:      12/05/2003 16:22:13
  Backup network drvs: no
  Collect TIR info:    no
  Mult. Data Streams:  no
  Client Encrypt:      no
  Checkpoint:          no
  Policy Priority:     99
  Max Jobs/Policy:     Unlimited
  Disaster Recovery:   0
  Collect BMR info:    no
  Residence:           L700e
  Volume Pool:         NetBackup
  Server Group:        *ANY*
  Keyword:             (none specified)
  Data Classification:       -
  Residence is Storage Lifecycle Policy:    no
  Application Discovery:      no
  Discovery Lifetime:      0 seconds
  ASC Application and attributes: (none defined)

  Granular Restore Info:  no
  Ignore Client Direct:  no
  Enable Metadata Indexing:  no
  Index server name:  NULL
  Use Accelerator:  no
  Optimized Backup:  no
  HW/OS/Client:  Windows-x64   Windows2008   pvldcbck02

  Include:  c:\temp

  Schedule:              Full
    Type:                Full Backup
    Frequency:           every 2 days
     Excluded Dates----------
      EXCLUDE DATE 0 - 04/28/2007
        No exclude days of week entered
    Synthetic:           0
    Checksum Change Detection: 0
    PFI Recovery:        0
    Maximum MPX:         8
    Retention Level:     1 (2 weeks)
    Number Copies:       1
    Fail on Error:       0
    Residence:           (specific storage unit not required)
    Volume Pool:         (same as policy volume pool)
    Server Group:        (same as specified for policy)
    Residence is Storage Lifecycle Policy:         0
    Schedule indexing:   0
    Daily Windows:
          Sunday     09:30:00  -->  Sunday     12:30:00
          Monday     09:30:00  -->  Monday     12:30:00
          Tuesday    09:30:00  -->  Tuesday    12:30:00
          Wednesday  09:30:00  -->  Wednesday  12:30:00
          Thursday   09:30:00  -->  Thursday   12:30:00
          Friday     09:30:00  -->  Friday     12:30:00
          Saturday   09:30:00  -->  Saturday   12:30:00

  Schedule:              Incremental
    Type:                Cumulative Incremental Backup
    Frequency:           every 2 days
     Excluded Dates----------
        No specific exclude dates entered
        No exclude days of week entered
    Synthetic:           0
    PFI Recovery:        0
    Maximum MPX:         8
    Retention Level:     1 (2 weeks)
    Number Copies:       1
    Fail on Error:       0
    Residence:           (specific storage unit not required)
    Volume Pool:         (same as policy volume pool)
    Server Group:        (same as specified for policy)
    Residence is Storage Lifecycle Policy:         0
    Schedule indexing:   0
    Daily Windows:
          Sunday     09:30:00  -->  Sunday     12:30:00
          Monday     09:30:00  -->  Monday     12:30:00
          Tuesday    09:30:00  -->  Tuesday    12:30:00
          Wednesday  09:30:00  -->  Wednesday  12:30:00
          Thursday   09:30:00  -->  Thursday   12:30:00
          Friday     09:30:00  -->  Friday     12:30:00
          Saturday   09:30:00  -->  Saturday   12:30:00

revarooo
Level 6
Employee

Add your Fulls to be open on specific days, say for example Mon, Wed, Fri, Sun and your Incs on Tue, Thu, Sat. Do this in the policy by selecting Schedule, selecting the relevant schedule and selecting the start window.

Then set the frequency to 1 day. .

 

sclind
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revaroo - thats what I have setup now.  I am looking for a true alternate running of the fulls and incrementals.

revarooo
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What do you mean by 'true' ? Do you mean it has to alternate, so one week the full is on the Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday and the incs on the other days and the week after the Incs are on the Monday etc?

 

If so, I would do this in a shell script (If you have a Unix Master)  and run the backups via cron for example.

 

 

sclind
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Yes - but I was hoping that Netbackup could by itself handle the concept of 'run a full backup every other day' and 'run an incremental backup on the other days'.

RiaanBadenhorst
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That is not what you have setup now. You have a Schedule for FULL which is open EVERY day. On exactly the same time slot as the INCR.

sclind
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I have set "Frequency: every 2 days". Shouldn't that run every other day?

sclind
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I have set "Frequency: every 2 days". Shouldn't that run every other day?

RiaanBadenhorst
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Why dont you use calendar?

revarooo
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Yeah but what happens if a resource is down on a specific day that a full or inc is supposed to run - it will run the next day - which you don't want!

Use Calendar based scheduling and pick the days you want them to run. You can set a full to run on Mon, Wed, Fri, Sun on week 1 then on week 2 Tue, Thu, Sat etc

Or script it - which is harder to do

sclind
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I guess using Calendar I could get close.  I could use Recurring Days of the Month to select even days for the FULL and odd days for the INCRMENTAL.  But when there are 31 days in the month that would mean I would get incrementals two days in a row.  I would probably have the same problem with Recurring week days.

I guess it looks like Netbackup really doesn't have an easy way to run a policy every other day.

Andy_Welburn
Level 6

How you're going about it *should* work theoretically, altho' it would be prone to 'issues' if there are any resource problems as revarooo (extra o!) has already mentioned.

You could try forcing it - run a full one day then force a cumulative the next - to give it a kick start.

Also, drop your frequency to 28 hours or similar - this should mean that the backup is ready to run when the next window opens if there were any delays starting or if you manually kicked off a backup a little later than the start of the window. With it being 2 days means that if it started at 10:30 Monday it wouldn't start until 10:30 Wednesday - if it gets delayed again, it gets closer to the window closing.

I was going to point you to David Chapa's article about frequency based backups, but I don't think it'd help here - altho' it's still a good read, so here you go:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/netbackup-frequency-based-scheduling-1

 

***EDIT***

The question that's been missed - why? What is your requirement for full-inc-full-inc-full......?

RiaanBadenhorst
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Good question Andy!

Will_Restore
Level 6

Yeah, that's not Best Practice ;^)

 

sclind
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These are are Exchange backups - they take a lot of tapes and we have decided that an incremental every other day meets our recovery objectives.

sclind
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Thanks to all  that have replied.  Looks like there really isnt a way to do this within the confines of the builtin Netbackup Job Scheduling.  I will continue with what I have now.  I was just hoping I could improve upon the process with a schedule setting that existed.

revarooo
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What is you Master server? Unix or Windows?

sclind
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This happens to be Windows.  Though we also have HPUX and AIX master servers for other systems.