Question about stopping backups at "fixed time"

[Carillon]

I have a backup that involves 52 Macs. The backup is scheduled to run daily between 5:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. The question I have is will the backup pick up where it left off or will it start from the beginning?

 

It would be nice if it picked up where it left off so it could at least make a complete backup of all sources before it started over with incremental files.

 

Thanks

[Maser]

IIRC, if the backup script is an *non-proactive* script, then it will back up things *in the order you added them to the backup script*

 

So if it's only set to run between 5 and 9, it'll start over from the beginning of the script the next time.

 

If you have *matching* turned on (the default), then if it had backed up the first 10 the first day (complete) it should back up the incremental files from those first 10 and then move on from there, so eventually you'll get where you need to be.

 

 

You might want to set a *proactive* backup script for those 52 -- then it marks the ones it missed as "as soon as possible" and usually will pick those first -- at least it should (my proactives run 24x7 and on Monday morning it immediately grabs all the laptops as they come in that weren't backed up over the weekend.)

 

 

 

[Carillon]

Thanks Maser, I experimented with the proactive backup script with my laptop and found it to be confusing as to when it decided to run. I scheduled it to run on M,W,F but it seemed to run hours after I came in and connected to the network. These backups need to run over night and on weekends since I don't want to impact production during the day. Is there a way to have proactive only run during specific "windows" of time?

 

Thanks

[Maser]

I think *in theory*, you are supposed to be able to set a schedule for Proactive Backups, but I think other forum users may have indicated this isn't working in 8.1.626

 

I'm not sure -- I want mine running 24x7 -- so I've never experimented with this.

 

But, I should say from experience -- unless you are backing up *tons* of incremental data and absolutely can't back things up while people are working on the computer -- there's very little "impact" on a client being scanned/backed up by the engine.

 

Maybe over a really slow network there is, but I've never noticed this being an issue -- ever -- over 100BaseT/Gigabit Ethernet.

[Carillon]

I couldn't find where to set a schedule for proactive backups so I have changed mine to standard. You're right, the impact is negligible for my internal clients on our gigabit ethernet but I have recently agreed to backing up a handful of satellite offices where our connection is only 10 megabit. It's gigabit inside their office but the copper between the two of us is 10 megabit. So, when backups are running for these folks it does impact them.

[scsctech]

My schedules for proactive seem to work just fine.

Every day from 8 am to 4.25pm

[rhwalker]

The question I have is will the backup pick up where it left off or will it start from the beginning?

 

It would be nice if it picked up where it left off so it could at least make a complete backup of all sources before it started over with incremental files.

IIRC, if the backup script is an *non-proactive* script, then it will back up things *in the order you added them to the backup script*

Actually, it's necessary to restart at the beginning of the backup script for the situations where Retrospect's scheduled operation has to be scripted (don't we wish) to be coordinated with other programs (stop/checkpoint/start of database services, etc.).

 

If that behavior were to change, there would need to be a preference for those people who wanted a round-robin resumption of an interrupted schedule.

 

Russ