Synthetic Full Schedule Doesn't Run.

[Michael_Cakar_2]

Hi there. I've got a synthetic backup policy created for one target. I've got a traditional full that runs every two months with a daily differential incremental then a daily full synthetic approx 2hours after the inc.

Now the traditional full and differential incremental schedules run as scheduled, but the synthetic full is never automatically executed. Does anyone have any ideas? We're running NBU 6.0 MP4 on Windows 2003. One master and two media servers.

thanks

mike.

[Dennis_Strom]

I do not know why that is happening 6.0 seems to have a few scheduling problems. But I have to ask why you are doing it this way. It seems a bit crazy. The one thing that could shut it down is if the dif has not completed by the time the synthetic launches. Perhaps if you increase the time window between the diff and the synthetic.

[Michael_Cakar_2]

Hey there. The diff finishes with around 1 hour to go before the full kicks in. We're running this way based on a recommendation we received... although i'm happy to do it another way if there are any recommendations?

cheers

mike.

[Dennis_Strom]

It seems to me the same can be achieved by doing weekly incrementals with a Weekend full. The result is two schedules instead of three. If the data isn't changing a lot or if you are not moving a lot of data it seems you could do a full every two weeks.

Another option is to do incrementas during the week on the weekend do a cumulitve and the every two months do a full.

What does you environment look like? Are you backing up a large environment?

[Michael_Cakar_2]

Hey Dennis. Unfortunately the office is a satellite office which is connected to our head office with a 2Mbps link and the full backup is approx 35GB which is why i try to limit the full backup to a bi-monthly occurrence.The diff inc is never usually more than 2 or 3GB.

When you refer to a "full" backup are you referring to a synthetic full or the traditional full? How often would you recommend we do a traditional full backup? A few of my "higher up" colleagues aren't too trusting of the synthetic backup technology. I'd like to do a yearly traditional full and then leave the rest diff inc and synthetic full.

I will modify my policy this weekend as such and see how it goes:
Mon - Fri - Diff Inc
Sat - Cum inc
Sunday - Synth full.
or does that seem over-kill?
cheers
mike

[Dennis_Strom]

It seems a cleaner solution. To me it does not seem as though the synthetic full buys you a lot if your getting a cumulitive but a little redundency does not hurt. Your plan looks like what I proposed with the addition of the synthetic full on Sun. The only thing that I think I would do differently is to do the regular Full backup at the end of every month instead of every two months. On the weekends when you do the regular Full backups exclude the other two backups to limit the amount of overhead on the network. You can do this in the calendar part of the schedule. Does not take much sysadmin time but will save you quite a bit of backup time.

[Michael_Cakar]

Thanks for that Dennis. I'll give it a spin and get back to you after the weekend.
cheers

mike

[Dennis_Strom]

cool if it works can you mark the thread as answered or helpful.
Thank you

[Michael_Cakar_2]

Well, I configured a Synthetic Full to run at 2am this morning (so I wouldn't have to wait for this weekend) and unfortunately only the differential incremental ran last night at 10pm. I think i'll have to pass this on over to Symantec support.

cheers

mike

[Michael_Cakar_2]

Hello all... just before I managed to log the call I came across this page: http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/285529.htm
I worked through the page and lo and behold my synthetic backup job actually kicked off. It's odd that I am running MP4 and still had to run through the steps in doc 285529...but hey, it works! :)

thanks for all your responses guys!

mike