Backup jobs more than once per hour?

It would be odd doing this every 15 minutes in Avamar since you need to allocate time for maintenance jobs such as checkpoints, garbage collections and HFS checks.

In my previous role I was faced with the same request.  We had SQL 2005 and 2008 which the DBA required the logs to be backed up every 2 hours.  The way we implemented this was that log backups between Avamar backups were performed by SQL itself.  This provided a point time recovery every 2 hours and did not require recovery from Avamar.

But if you really wanted to do the every 15 minutes log backups through Avamar,  the only way that I can see you do it through the Administrator Console is to create multiple Schedules and groups and the same dataset. A bit tideous for my liking.

my 2 cents

The Avamar scheduling is such a way designed to allow user to select hourly based backups and NOT giving space to enter specific time. We cannot really ask Avamar to run backups every 15 or 30 minutes !

We do have the same requirements and questions about how do we run minutes backup (15, 30, 45, 60) from Avamar. I suspect it falls as On-Demand backup.

Agreed that I cannot make this happen during the maintenance windows.  I have explained that caveat to them already and have gotten a pass on that.  I suppose I'm going to need to figure out how to configure something at the command line from the client itself.  Anyone know offhand which document will outline that process or set of commands?

-Wade

If you haven't already, refer to EMC document P/N 300-008-824 "EMC Avamar Oracle Client 5.0 User Guide REV A02", assuming Avamar Server version is 5.0. Follow the page 72 till 90. You can ask DBA's to setup RMAN scripts and trigger the backups from the database server.

I would personally prefer scheduling all through Avamar. DBA's to dump the logs on to the local disk and Avamar can backup up every hour of the file system. It may not fit in the maintenance window (say 3hrs or 4 hrs) and the jobs will be queued. Full database backup continues in the Avamar backup window.  If something goes wrong with database and had to be recovered, first full database and log restore can happen from Avamar, the difference in the minutes can be applied from local disk. However, we have to look at the RPO and plan accordingly.

Probably not the answer you are looking for but Avamar and many other backup solutions aren't designed for data recovery with Recovery Point Objectives less than 24 hours. Of course it is possible to backup data more than once a day especially with Avamar but this generates a lot of unwanted load on the systems. I think the best solution is using snapshot technology like Replication Manager or RecoverPoint.

Yes, snapshot can be used, it contributes RPO and RTO as well. It comes to backup for disaster recovery. You need to allocate enough resources to hold snapshots and not to forget about data change rates. Recovery Point or/and Recovery Manager are helpful only in certain environments. The limitations are, it works only with EMC storages (except Recovery Point) and fibre channel / iSCSI attached block volumes (For Ex: Symmetrix, CLARiiON, Celerra).

If infrastructure has similar environment, good concept of data protection and replication. The snapshots can be used later for backups and works well. There are datacentres hosting storage servers (Ex: Oracle x4540, Dell, etc), servers with CIFS or NFS. From backup prospective, DBA send the log to backup server and copy shipped to seconday data centre, can be every 30, 60 or 180 minutes. The files gets deleted after the backup completes successfully.

We can continue to use Avamar, as we all know, the jobs gets queued during the maintenance window (read only). Even other backup products does the same but available 24 hours. I'm still about to test Avamar with respect to log backups at regular intervals.

Khan, Sameer would like to recall the message, "[Avamar] New message: "Backup jobs more than once per hour?"".

I believe below procedure can be used for other backups as well.

A customer may need to run SQL transaction log backup every 15 miuntes or so when running Avamar server:

Cause

A customer may have this requirement and possibly hourly backups are not enough.

Resolution

**Contact your database vernor for support with database backups and other database functions**

To back up a SQL database, we need to run avsql. It is NOT sufficient to run avtar. Unfortunately, running avsql directly from the command-line is NOT supported.

Performing incremental backups for large and busy databases every 15 minutes is common and advisable. Below is the procedure to achieve this:

1. Create a Dataset i.e.,SQL15minsincDS

a. Select the database to backup

b. Choose incremental as backup type

2. Under Policy, create a New Group i.e., SQL15minsincGROUP

a. Add Dataset SQL15minsincDS to the group

b. Select Retention, client etc

3. Under Policy, click on Group and run backup to make sure group meets the requirements

Once satisfied, logon to the Avamar Server via putty as the root user.

1. Create a batch file in the /usr/local/avamar/bin i.e., sqlinc and add the followings:

/usr/local/avamar/bin/mccli client backup-group-dataset --xml --name=/DOMAIN_NAME/CLIENT_NAME --group-name=/SQL15minsincGROUP

2. Save file and set the execute permissions i.e., chmod 755 sqlinc

3. Run the file and make sure that the backup is performed.

4. As root, type crontab -e and add the followings (This will perform backup every 15 minutes, mon-fri from 9 to 5. Change schedule if needed)

*/15 9-17 * * 1-5 /usr/local/avamar/bin/sqlinc >/dev/null 2>&1

5. Save and exit

Backups will be initiated every 15 minutes. You should monitor activity to ensure that backups are correctly running every 15 minutes.

Thanks and Regards,

Sameer Khan

Technical Support Engineer

Worlwide Technical Support- Avamar

EMCIE(Avamar),VCP4,SCS,MCP

Sameer.Khan@emc.com

Office Hours: Monday to Friday, 11 am to 8pm EST

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