I just figured out how to configure my schedules in Legato
automatically, after many years of doing it via a manual process. I'm
going to document it here because Legato scheduling is poorly explained,
I often see questions about it on this list, and it appears it's not as
inflexible as it seems as long as you have a little know-how. Note that
this is version 7.3.3. Apologies if this has been explained on here
before, and if anyone has a better way to do this, I'd love to hear it.

Currently, we do most of our backups this way:

-          Fulls once a week, incremental all other nights

-          Last full backup per month is a "monthly" backup sent offsite
for longer

-          Once a quarter, the last full backup per month is a
"quarterly" backup instead of a monthly backup, sent offsite for even
longer

 

We would create one client per system we were backing up, and place it
into three groups: weekly, monthly, and quarterly.  The weekly group
would have something like a "Full every Friday - Weekly" schedule that
would do a full backup every Friday and incremental all other nights,
except the last Friday of the month, which had a "skip" override.  The
monthly group would have a "Friday full only - Monthly" schedule which
would skip all days except the last Friday of the month, which had a
"full" override, unless it was the last Friday of the quarter (ie, last
Friday in March, June, September, or December). The quarterly group
would have a "Friday Full Only - Quarterly" schedule which would skip
all days except the last Friday of the quarter, when it would have a
"full" override.  These had to be a weekly instead of a monthly
schedules because we were going by days of the week, not month.  For
years we would go through the schedules manually and set these overrides
one at a time, which is a huge pain and prone to errors. Here's how to
do it automatically:

Under Configuration->Schedules, right-click one of the schedules and
uncheck "Show schedule as a calendar".

Now create a new schedule, for example "Full every Friday - Weekly" for
the regular backup. Set the Period to "Week", and the action to incr
incr incr incr incr full incr. This sets incrementals all days except
Friday, which is full. Now, under override, type "skip last Friday every
month". Save and close.

 

The second one, called "Friday Full only - Monthly" would look like
this:

Period: week

Action: skip skip skip skip skip skip skip

Override:

skip last Friday every 3 month

full last Friday every month

 

Note that the order of overrides matters! The top
override...ahem...overrides the bottom override. For example, if the
order had been reversed, no Fridays would ever be skipped. With this
order, first every Friday is set to full, then every 3 months it's
skipped again. Also, the "skip last Friday every 3 month" is not a typo.
You have to use the word "month", not "months", even if it's more than
one.

 

Finally, the third  one, called "Friday Full only - Quarterly" would
look like this:

 

Period: week

Action: skip skip skip skip skip skip skip

Override:

Full last Friday every 3 month

 

Hopefully this will save some people lots of time and headaches.

 

~Alex

 


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