Client Groups

[maisany]

I'm still trying to get my brain around how to do this, but I would like to know if this is possible:

 

I want to backup the end user machines.

 

I want to group them in small groups so that each day, a subset is backed up, rather than the entire user community.

 

I want to stagger each group on a weekly basis.

 

I want to back them all up to five backup sets, one for each day of the week.

 

Hence Group A would get backed up to the MONDAY set on week 1, the TUESDAY set on week 2, the WEDNESDAY set on week 3...

 

Group B would get backed up to the TUESDAY set on week 1, the WEDNESDAY set on week 2...

 

Group C would start with WEDNESDAY on week 1, so forth, so on.

 

Oh, and I want all of the groups to be disk backup sets on a NAS device.

 

Can I do this? Any reason why I shouldn't? Should I make the back up sets correspond to the groups rather than the days of the week? Thanks.

[natew]

Hi

 

Anything is possible and it can work. However setting this up will be a pain in the Neck.

 

Making source groups is easy. You can do that on the configure->volumes screen.

 

I have some suggestions but I have a few questions first:

-Why do you want to break the groups up and back them up seperately on different days? Time? Storage space?

-Are you doing a full backup every day or incremental backups?

 

One thing you could do is this:

-Set a global stop time in Retrospect so that all operations stop at 8:00AM or so

-Create 5 scripts, one for each day.

-Include all the source groups in each script _but_ change the order of the groups. For example on Mondays Group A is first in the script sources list. On Tuesdays, Group B is first on the sources list and Group A is moved to last and so on.

 

The backups will run in order one group at a time until the stop time is reached.

 

Hope that makes sense.

Nate

[maisany]

Nate,

 

thanks for your response.

 

I want to break things up, both into smaller groups and into days of the week for several reasons.

 

First, the backups have to take place during the day for the most part as the majority of my users are laptops and are gone during the off hours.

 

Second, I want to break it up into smaller, discrete groups so that I don't wind up backing up *everybody* on any given day. Your suggestion of re-ordering the source groups is a possible alternate approach.

 

Third, I want to stagger the days of the week to give each group an opportunity to have a shot at a "light day" in their schedule. If I put them into fixed day schedules, invariably, we would have very few people being backed up on Fridays, or on Mondays. At least by staggering it, everybody is evened out over time.

 

We're not looking for daily backups and I was thinking of doing Regular backup for three weeks then doing a recycle to complete a four-week rotation. Since quite a few of our laptop users are traveling a great deal of the time, we'll be lucky if we get them two times in each four week cycle.

 

I'm not backing up entire systems. I've already told the users that we only have enough space to backup data so they'd better organize all of their folders so that they fall under their "My Documents" folders (everyone is on XP). In pilot groups, after the initial "full" backup, each incremental takes only about 15 minutes so it shouldn't be a significant drag on their systems even during the day. We'll probably do full system disaster recovery backups to tape maybe quarterly.

 

Am I being overly elaborate or am I missing something? Thanks again for your input.

[natew]

Hi

 

Thanks for the clarification. That makes perfect sense.

 

Have you considered using the Proactive Backup add on for Retrospect? I think it will give you something close to what you are looking for.

 

You can tell the script to backup every client every x days. It will poll the network for machines that have not been backed up in that time period and automatically skip the ones that have. This way you don't keep harrassing the people who have already been backed up.

 

The set rotation could still work this way too but you may have to revise it a bit.

 

If Proactive Backup is not something you can do I think your best bet is to try what I had mentioned in my previous post. I'll keep thinking though...

 

Nate

[maisany]

Hmm...I wasn't aware that that was how proactive backup worked. I thought that a proactive backup job sort of sat there, within a specified period of time, and it required some action on the part of the client to actually kick off a backup.

 

I guess I will have to read up on proactive backup a bit more.

[natew]

Hi

 

 

 

Proactive actively looks for clients that have not been backed up. As an option it allows users to defer a backup if it starts at an inconvinient time. Users can also select "backup ASAP" which will start a backup as soon as the server becomes available.

 

 

 

Thanks

 

Nate

[maisany]

OK Nate, I got all of that from reading the manual again this weekend, but according to what I read, you can only do regular backups, no recycle or new media backups, so how do you do recycle or new media backups? Can you schedule a proactive backup to run three out of four weeks of a month, then run a recycle in the fourth week?

 

What I would like to do ideally, is to do the regular backups three out of ever four weeks to disk, then at the end of the third week, do a transfer from disk to tape of all of the backups for the previous three weeks so that we preserve all of that historical information, then do a recycle that fourth week, again to disk, effectively setting everything back to zero again.

 

If I keep doing this and I keep transferring multiple incremental backups from disk to tape, will we be able to go back to any of those days, regardless of the fact that recycle backups are occurring every four weeks?

[awnews]

I've raised this *incredible* limitation of Proactive backup. No, you can't do a "Proactive Recycle." I would characterize the current "limitation" as an indication that Dantz doesn't really believe in or understand the purpose of Proactive despite the fact that they hype it in the docs & brochures.

 

When I've raised the issue (and it's a serious one. Right now I have a 150-computer Retro MS system with overflowing Proactive backups that need to be recycled), the recommended "solution" was to schedule a *separate" (i.e. another 150 scripts [in my case] to setup and maintain...) time-scheduled recycle of these sets. This of course *completely* misses the point of the whole Proactive architecture--the computers are *not on* at a known date & time, so having a scheduled recycle is pure hit & miss. And if it's just set up to copy an empty set (i.e. replacing the proactive dataset with blank data) you run the risk of a (large) time window between valid data and empty data (i.e. deleting the data not knowing if/when a working client will return).

 

Dantz expressed the opinion that setting up a Recycle Backup presented some difficulties but I think it's extremely simple. Just like a scheduled recycle backup, run a proactive recycle after N days/months/years/etc. Or it could be set up for every Nth proactive backup.

 

--------------------------------------------

Another comment. Since a user can Defer a backup, RMS includes an option to control how long RMS will wait before it tries again (after a failure or deferral). However, I find that this doesn't work correctly. Even though I have it set to 70min, I've seen RMS retry the backup in as little as 10min (as seen in the log as the user has to defer again).

[natew]

Hi

 

You are correct in that you cannot set recycles in Proactive backup.

 

Here is what I would do:

-Make sure the media request timeout option is not enabled.

-Set up proactive backup to run normal backups as usual.

-Set up a backup set transfer script to run on the first Tuesday of every month. This script should be assigned to execution unit 1.

-Set up a standard backup script that also runs on the first Tuesday of every month. Assign it to execution unit 1 and set it to run 5 minutes after the transfer script.

 

This way the recycle backup will not take place unless the data has been transfered to tape first. The recycle backup will reset your backup set and back up as many clients as are available on that first day. After that Proactive backups will pick up anyone who was missed.

 

You could do this on any day of course. The day with the fewest holidays over the year would be best.

 

Nate