Calendar-based scheduling was better once I got to a certain level of
understanding.
Pros:
A good benefit was being able to add a client to a policy and, like
magic, a full backup is done that evening, even though 98% of my fulls
are done on a weekend.
Like many, I have a weekly full backup with one retention, and a less
frequent, full backup that is retained longer. This meant that each
weekend I'd have some of one kind of backup and some of another. Since
I have one retention level per tape, this meant I'd frequently have a
slow, long retention backup "hogging" a tape drive when other backups
were playing nicely at my multiplexing limit. On bad days, I'd have 2
or 3 of these slow backups start on different tapes, really putting a
crimp into the works (I only have 5 drives and they are busy 90+% of the
time). Calendar-based scheduling has allowed me to minimize this. Now,
all my (monthly) long-retention backups are done during the first week
of the month. I may want to watch that first week, but in general the
calendar-based schedules run without any babysitting.
Also, for those clients that allow it, the "allow retry after run day"
really helps NetBackup keep backups going so I don't have to babysit so
much. In my experience, I have more complete backups with this setting
and that means better ability to restore.
Add a periodic "endangered filesets" report (courtesy of someone on this
mailing list) and I now consider NetBackup (v5.1MP5) worthy of its
"Enterprise" title, something I would not have said before (this report
and calendar-based scheduling)!
Some have complained about before and after midnight being different
days, with problems or unexpected results with a window that spans
midnight. Frequency-based schedules share some of these problems, so
some time ago I just split up my workload so some backups are kicked off
before midnight and some after. Setup well, I get few 196s (backup
didn't start in window), and most of them are not at midnight, but at 4
or 5 in the morning when something strange happened to delay everything.
Cons:
Relative to frequency-based scheduling, calendar-based schedules have no
cons. If I hadn't started with frequency-based schedules in NetBackup,
I'd say frequency-based is weird and goofy. What? You mean I pick a
4-day frequency for weekly backups? Now that is goofy. ;-)
cheers, wayne
Hindle, Greg wrote, in part, on 6/13/2006 2:36 PM:
>
> What are the pros and cons of each?
>
>
> We have switched from calendar base to frequency based but there are
> rumblings about switching back. I need more info to keep this from
> happening. I have copies down ideas from the current discussion but
> thought their has to be more reason why frequency based is better than
> calendar based? Right?
>
>
> Greg
>
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