Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] Help with scheduling

2005-07-18 15:28:38
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Help with scheduling
From: ewilts AT ewilts DOT org (Ed Wilts)
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2005 14:28:38 -0500
On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 01:54:31PM -0500, Larsen, Errin M HMMA/Information 
Technology Department wrote:
> Hi NBUers,
> 
> I'm trying to create a set of schedules for a policy as follows:
> 
> 1) Full Backup, retention 1 year, every 3 months (1 time per quarter),
> on the 1st Sunday of that month
> 
> 2) Cum. Incr. every month, retention 2 months, on the 1st Sunday of that
> month (excluding the month of the full)
> 
> 3) Cum. Incr. every Sunday, retention 2 weeks (excluding the 1st Sunday
> of that month)
> 
> 4) Diff. Incr. every Mon - Sat, retention 1 week
> 
> Please, comment/critique on the design.

Personally, I don't like the design.  NetBackup is really, really
designed to do frequency-based scheduling, not calendar based
scheduling.  The calendar stuff mostly works but you're fighting
NetBackup and not using many of its advantages.

The real issues comes down to what you want done when backups fail, and
fail they will.  Your schedule is relatively clean when all goes well,
but what do you want to have happen when your quarterly fails on the
first Sunday of the month?  Do you want it re-run the following day?
The next Sunday?

I've generally found that letting the frequency-based scheduling works
and works extremely well.  I let most of the fulls run during the week
because the load on the backed-up server is typically fairly light and
it eventually balances out across your servers and mount points over
time.

I've also seen creative frequency-based scheduling that does a weekly
every 4 days but only has windows open on the weekend.  That allows for
some nice flexibility when you need to reschedule failed backup jobs -
we're doing that for some of our servers that really want the equivalent
of calendar-based scheduling without the downsides.

-- 
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org

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