NetBackup jobs not starting per schedule

[yvonne_ewry]

Hi all,

I am currently using NetBackup 6.5.3 on a Windows 2003 SP2 server.  Currently, I have differentials set to run daily starting at 5:00pm and ending every next day at 7:00am.  I have the frequency set to every 1 days, and the retention level is set to 1 month (level 3). 

I have the full backups set to start every Friday night at 5:00pm and ending on Sunday at 7:00am with a frequency set to 1 week and a duration of 2 months (level 4).

My question is, when doing a Manual Backup on the policies that contain the clients, do Manual Backup's override the schedules for the differential and/or full backup's to occur.  For some reason, on Tuesday night, I lost the network connection to my NetBackup server, so the server was not able to communicate with any of the clients.  When I realized what happened Wednesday morning, I ran the Manual Backup on all of the policies to get a good differential backup of the servers that did not backup the night before due to the network communication failure.  This morning when I came in (Thursday), none of the differential backup's ran (only the catalog backup ran on the local NetBackup server)...  I'm wondering if me running the Manual Backup on Wednesday morning prevented the differentials from starting last night at 5:00pm.  I ran a Manual Backup this morning again and am now fearing that the differentials won't start tonight at 5:00pm because I activated the Manual Backup option.

If anyone has any advice to this problem, I'd greatly appreciate it.  I've never experience the problem when the schedules and policies were in a good working state, and now have just stopped launching at their predefined times.

Please advise.
Thanks, and happy computing!

Yvonne

[J_H_Is_gone · Accepted solution]

if you run a manual it counts as a backup.
change your policy a little bit.

you schedules window is from 5 pm to 7 am - if I can count that is  14 hours.
but you have your frequency set to one day - meaning do not start again until 24 hours after

change your frequency to 15 hours.

Not to say that this will completely help as if you do a manual at 4 pm it will be 15 hours before it tries again and your window would be closed.

but if you did a manual at 10 am  - plus 15 hours gives you would still be within your window for a new job to kick off.

Basic rule of thumb - set your frequency to Longer then your Window but Shorter then what you want.

So a window that is 5 hours long would be set to something between 6 and 10 hours.
a window that is 2 days long and runs once a week would be set to something between 3 days and 6 days.

[yvonne_ewry]

Hi J.,

Thank you for your input.  I have changed the frequencies for the differential policies to 15 hours.  What you have stated makes total sense.  As I mentioned, I did a Manual Backup on the clients at around 7:15am PST, and have now changed the frequencies to 15 hours, so hopefully when I get in tomorrow morning, the differentials will have ran successfully.  Am keeping fingers crossed and will let you know the outcome.

I have another quick concern that maybe you, or anyone else can help me with.  In doing a Catalog backup, sometimes the job will error out with an error 121 - no media is defined for the requested NB database backup, yet when I check the Catalog Backup policy, the media is defined to use the CatalogBackup volume pool which contains available media in it.  This is not an Offline Catalog backup, but a hot Catalog backup.  I don't understand why this error keeps occurring when media seems (in my view) to be defined for that policy...

Again, thank you for your input.  I appreciate it!
Yvonne

[Marianne]

Hi Yvonne
Judy's reply is definately the solution to your 1st problem.
I suggest you start a separate thread for your 2nd problem?
It will be posted with the appopriate heading and users with similar problems can share their experience...

[yvonne_ewry]

Marianne,

I will do.  Thank you for the direction.  I will mark Judy's explanation as the solution.

Thanks!