Re: [Veritas-bu] Quarterly Backups and Calendar Schedule

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 12:45 AM, Wayne T Smith <wts AT maine DOT edu> wrote:

I disagree (never good to disagree with Ed ... he's always right ...
here goes anyway)...

Now you've done it :-)

IMHO, Calendar schedules are superior to Frequency based schedules in
this case.

First, NetBackup can do last Friday of the month, but not quarter. If
you use NetBackup scheduling, you need to decide whether you want NO
BACKUPS *or* MONTHLY backups if/when you forget to extend your
schedule. If you choose to NO BACKUPS is OK, specify the dates of your
quarterly backups. If time goes past the dates you specify, NetBackup
will quietly do NO BACKUPS. The alternative is to schedule last Friday
of the month backups and exclude all but the last Friday of the month.
this is more work, but fails by doing too many backups.

Second, you must account for missed/failed backups. You have some
choices here. If you can only rerun on a Friday, only create a Friday
window for the schedule and select "retry after run day"). The backup
will be retried next Friday. This will work perfectly for a calendar
based schedule, but frequency-based schedules will precess (is that the
word I'm looking for?) ... the end of next quarter backup will be first
tried a week late. If you can retry failures on other days of the week
and use calendar based schedules, simply create a schedule window for
each day you wish to allow a retry. Again, Frequency based schedules
cannot do this (and maintain 1st backup on a Friday.

It is surprising that the scheduler was recently rewritten (or I
understand it was), and concepts such as quarterly and yearly are still
missing.

What you've gone and done is set up a very complicated method of defining a quarterly schedule that has a 90-day frequency and a schedule that probably runs from Friday to Sunday. The fact that you're allowing a failed/missed backup to run the following Friday already tells me you don't *need* a quarterly - you need a backup of roughly that frequency (and probably retention). If you absolutely had to have a quarterly backup, you'd be retrying immediately and making it work.

Simple is good - too many manual steps and it the process will break down - either by you when you get busy and forget the complicated retry steps, or by your successor.

Every person on this list should know how to set up a 90-day frequency with the right retention and window. The fact that we have already over 10 posts discussing how to do quarterly backups tells me that you don't want to do this because it's too complex. And the fact that we're saying that the jobs should run on the last Friday of the quarter also tells me that you're not after quarterly backups or you'd run them on the last day of the quarter, not the day that happens to be conveniently around the end of the quarter - you're not getting your quarter-end processing in this backup.

The scheduler doesn't need quarterly or yearly backups because the functionality is already there. The first rule of solving a problem is clearly defining the business problem you're trying to solve. With all this complicated rule-set around a theoretical quarter-end backup, what business problem have you solved? How does it really differ from a frequency-based backup?

.../Ed

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

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