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NetBackup Scheduling woes... 1

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hokey71

IS-IT--Management
Nov 15, 2003
8
US
I'm having some trouble with scheduling my backups the way I want and am hoping to get some advice on the subject.

I am currently backing up 19 servers. I want to perform full backups on Friday night and incrementals Monday through Thursday. Working hours are between 8am and 11:00pm. I would like to start the backups at 11:30pm and allow them to run till 8am so it does not interfere with working hours.

It seems very simple but I am having some problems getting it to work properly. I am using calendar based scheduling and some backups do not finish until after midnight. When that happens they do not start the following day because they have already been backed up for that day. If I use frequency based backups the times they backup get later and later and eventually skip a day and sometimes my weekly backups can go for several weeks without a backup.

Apparently using calendar based backups even if the backup starts before midnight and finishes after midnight it will go by the end time and that's why it will skip a day. If you using the frequency based it will backup up again after the time that is set. For instance if set the frequency to 24 hours and my backup window is 11:30pm-8:00am the first backup will start at 11:30pm on Monday. If it finishes at 12:30pm then 24 hours from that time it will backup again. eventually it will complete after 8:00am and then schedule it for 24 hours after that time which will be out of the backup window and it will skip backups.

I also noticed if I performed a manual backup for some reason during the day it will not backup with the schedule for that day because it already backed it up. I use Backup Exec for another network and I schedule backups to run at a certain time and they start at exactly that time and if I run a backup manually the scheduled one still gets kicked off.

Bottom line is that I am missing backups and unless I look at what was backed up every day I will never know if all my servers are getting backed up. At least backup Exec will show an error if a backup is missed because of the window closing. In NetBackup if the window closed or if it doesn't think a backup needs to run it will not error or let me know.

I'm pretty sure I understand how it is supposed to work but I don't know how I can get it to do what I want it to do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I am using NetBackup 6.0MP2 with Windows server 2000 SP4. I have an overland neo2000 library with 2 tape drives.
 
Change your frequency of the incrementals to 18 hours and the weekly to 4 days.
 
Can you explain how changing the frequency to 18 hours and weekly to 4 days will solve my problem? I am just not sure what that will do for me.
 
And no, I am not seeing anything in the activity monitor.
 
Frequency is just that. If you state every 1 day or 24 hours, it will backup 24 hours after your last backup.

If your backups start at 8:00PM and completes at 11:00PM and you specify 18 hours for the frequency, the schedular dameon (bpsched) will fire off 18 hours after the last backup. In this case it would be 5:00PM. Well if the your start schedule does not allow it to start until 8, then the scheduler is told that no, I cannot go now but I can @ 8PM.
 
Thanks comtec
Earlier this morning I was puzzling over why one of my backups always seems to wait until an hour into the backup window before going active - I think you've just solved my problem for me.

cheers
 
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