Six months ago I was all frequency-based, and now I've nearly everything 
converted to calendar-based schedules and the results (to me) are 
excellent.  (***)

Let's say I do "fulls" on Friday nights, but every month I want a "full" 
that is retained longer.  With frequency-based scheduling, each Friday 
night I'd have some regular and some long-retention backups, sometimes 
causing a much longer backup window than expected as I might have lots 
of backups with one retention, but most tape drives tied up with the 
other retention (Most of my backups are multiplexed).  With 
calendar-based scheduling, I specify the first Friday of the month for 
the long retention and other Fridays for the regular retention.  Works 
great.  Note that you specify both calendar days and windows, so for 
many of my "monthly fulls", I have a second window (either the next day 
or the 2nd week Friday) and specify "Retries allowed after run day".  If 
an important monthly backup fails, then it is not only retried on the 
run day, but during a later window.

The same goes for yearly backups.  And with yearly backups, the data 
owners usually *want* their long-retention backup on or closely after a 
certain date, so calendar-based scheduling is perfect.

This is all with v5.1MP4 ... I'm ignorant still of v6.0.  Someone care 
to briefly explain new features for us?

cheers, wayne

P.S. (***) Note that I'm calling calendar-based scheduling excellent 
with respect to frequency-based scheduling ... I am in no way calling 
NetBackup excellent (or otherwise).

Martin, Jonathan (Contractor) wrote, in part,  on 2/27/2006 4:13 PM:
> Speaking of Calendar vs frequency, how does everyone do their end of
> month backups?  / End of year?  Do you use calendar and schedule or
> frequency?  I've got two types of policies here, one where they've set
> "Last Day of the Month" or even manually selected dates (ARGH!) and some
> others use "once a month."
>