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Brian91_4544b4
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February 22nd, 2013 06:00
Six-Monthly Backup Schedule
Hello
Our customer wants to change their backup schedules and retention times. They currently use:
1 Full backup every Friday, retained for one month (first Friday is skipped)
2 Full backup first Friday of every month, retained for 6 years
They now want to switch:
1 Full backup every Friday, retained for one month (first Friday is skipped) - i.e. no change
2 Full backup first Friday of every month, retained for 6 months
3 Full backup first Friday of May and November, retained for 6 years
How can I program a skip for schedule 2 to "skip the first Friday of May and November" and how can I program schedule 3 for "full backup on the first Friday of May and November"?
For schedule 3, I can use update override: Full first Friday every 2 quarter or update override: Full first Friday every 6 month, but that will give me a full backup on the first Friday in January and July. [If I use update override: Full first Friday every 3 quarter, I get a full backup on the first Friday of January and October - I accept October, but why January?]
For schedule 2, I can use update override: Full first Friday every month, incr first Friday every 2 quarter (I'm using "incr" instead of "skip" for testing purposes). This gives me the full backup on the first Friday of every month, but, although nsradmin accepts the second override as being valid (and it is as it works for schedule 3), it makes no difference to the schedule, i.e. it appears to be ignored as the first Friday of every month has a full backup and none of them are set to incr.
I think what I'm trying to do is too complex for NetWorker's syntax and I will either have to resort to external scheduling or manually amending the schedules with skips (schedule 2) or fulls (schedule 3) for the appropriate months, but can anyone confirm this?
I am using NetWorker 7.6.3.
Thanks
Brian
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Posted February 25th, 2013 02:00
Thanks for the reply, Bingo.
Yes, external scheduling probably would do the trick, but I'd much rather let NetWorker deal with everything in the one place.
As for separate pools, NW would pick up this information from the group - we have the backups configured with the retention against the client and pool against the group (i.e. we'll have three clients all told in three groups - one for the Daily [month retention] group, one for the Monthly [six monthly retention] group and one for the Six-Monthly [six year retention] group).
Whilst we could run a staging process after the backup, I think that just complicates matters - I like to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible
.
I did think my request was a bit "out there" so unless anyone comes up with a simple way to do things, I think I'll just manually add overrides to the schedules.
(I think this version of NetWorker knows dates up to 2038, so it shouldn't take me long to go through three schedules for the next 25 years, should it?
)
Brian
bingo.1
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Posted February 22nd, 2013 11:00
Your task is unusual and actually not that easy as you have to consider 2 issues: timing & retention
1. Timing
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Honestly - before i would setup a specific schedule, i would add the clients to 3 disabled groups and prepare an appropriate savegrp job command which will be started by cron/task scheduler. The second is pretty comfortable in setting the jobs your're takling about.
The command itself should read like : savegrp -l full -w "6 months" -e "6 months" -G
2. Retention
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If you backup to tape, you should send a backup with a different retention policy to a different pool. Unfortunately, you cannot specify a pool along with the savegrp command.
But you could also use a single schedule (full_on_fridays) and later adjust retention time by running a script which will then stage the save sets with longer retention time to another pool (nsrstage -y "retention_time" -b pool -S ssid) .