Bowie Bailey <[email protected]> wrote on 03/30/2011 10:52:21 AM:

> On 3/30/2011 10:16 AM, Scott wrote:
> > Full backups from one machine look like they are going to take > 12
> > hours, so a night time full backup is not going to work - for this one
> > machine I need it to happen starting Friday night so it has all
> > weekend to finish (poor connectivity).    All the other machines can
> > stay on the normal default schedule.   Is this possible/how? Thanks!
> 
> Two possibilities here:
> 
> 1) Start the backup manually the first Friday night.  After this, the
> normal backup scheduling will continue starting the backup at
> approximately the same time each week.  If it shifts too much, then run
> another manual backup to get it back on schedule.

This actually works reasonably well.  If the impact of running the fulls 
on the wrong day occasionally isn't too great and you keep an eye once a 
week, this works sufficiently.

Also, don't forget that future fulls are shorter than the first full if 
you use rsync/rsyncd.  So if the first one is taking 12 hours, the 
subsequent ones will take less.

Finally, is a 12 hour backup really that bad for your environment?  Can it 
run from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M., for example?

In any case, if you absolutely have to make sure you run them on a certain 
day...

> 2) Disable scheduled backups for this machine and run them from cron
> instead.  For example:
> 
> # Machine1 backups (3:15am) -- Full on Saturday, Inc other days
> 15 3 * * 6 /usr/local/BackupPC/bin/BackupPC_serverMesg backup machine1
> machine1 backuppc 1
> 15 3 * * 0-5 /usr/local/BackupPC/bin/BackupPC_serverMesg backup machine1
> machine1 backuppc 0

I do not recommend *disabling* scheduled backups.  But modify it:  set the 
full backup age to something like 7.97 days and use the cron entries 
described above.  That way, if something goes wrong with the cron jobs, 
BackupPC will still initiate a backup.  Yes, it will do this a day late, 
but at least you're getting a backup--and maybe the slowdown (or whatever 
you're trying to avoid by running it on a certain day) will let you know 
that there's a problem!  :)

The other thing to keep in mind is that, while it's not tremendously great 
for the performance of a server to be doing a backup, most decent servers 
can handle a backup running right in the middle of the day with only a 
little drop in performance.  I've done that more than once when a backup 
had a problem for whatever reason and I don't want to wait to get a backup 
in.

In short, it's probably a good idea to really make sure you *have* to have 
things exactly like you want them rather than just let BackupPC take care 
of things and occasionally readjust things (i.e. start a manual full on 
Friday if they get out of sync).

Timothy J. Massey

 
Out of the Box Solutions, Inc. 
Creative IT Solutions Made Simple!
http://www.OutOfTheBoxSolutions.com
[email protected] 
 
22108 Harper Ave.
St. Clair Shores, MI 48080
Office: (800)750-4OBS (4627)
Cell: (586)945-8796 
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