Thank you, this is a really large answer. However my English is not very well I hope I understand your answer right.
At the moment the solution is only doing incr backups and full via cron? You told something about an delta. Are diff backups better for me? I want to do the following: I have an Mailserver which should do a full backup every week. It could happen that I delete an email faulty, so I decided to backup the mails every hour. This I want do with incr backups. If a mail get lost I can restore this Mail from the backup archive. I've looked in the archive. Sometimes the incr backup is only 20mb, sometimes 200mb. Perhaps it is an better idea to only backup /var/vmail directory hourly instead of the full root path. It also would be nice if some option like 'backupType' => 'full' would be implemented. I could image something like a name you can setup for an backup, so you can setup blackout periods different. For example: BackupSet1 (full every week) with own blackout periods BackupSet2 (incr full root path daily) with own blackout periods BackupSet3 (incr /var/vmail path hourly) with own blackout periods If no specials blackout periods defined, the default system blackout periods would be used. Greetings, Alex -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Holger Parplies [mailto:wb...@parplies.de] Gesendet: Mittwoch, 1. April 2015 23:38 An: Les Mikesell Cc: General list for user discussion, questions and support Betreff: Re: [BackupPC-users] Different Blackout Periods Hi, Les Mikesell wrote on 2015-04-01 13:25:56 -0500 [Re: [BackupPC-users] Different Blackout Periods]: > On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 1:03 PM, <alexander.rehb...@fmex.de> wrote: > > > > I want to setup the following backup plan. Every week one full > > backup and every hour an incremental backup. > > > > This works but i have a problem with the balackout periods. Full > > backups should only done at night. is it possible to configure this? > > There is no way to specify different blackouts for fulls vs. > incrementals. true. > However fulls won't happen until the FullPeriod time has expired since > the last one, so if you force one at an appropriate time, subsequent > runs will happen at about the same time a week later. That is not strictly true. If I remember correctly, a new full backup will not happen until the FullPeriod has expired since *completion* of the last one which might be significantly later, depending on the time the backup takes and backup concurrency issues. Usually, you can compensate for that with the schedule, blackouts, and an appropriately lower FullPeriod, to keep your backups from wandering through the day. Here, however, blackouts can't be used. What you suggest is very much equivalent to "implement the effect of blackouts by just forgetting about them". If blackouts are a requirement, i.e. full backups *must* only be done at night, rather than "it would be rather convenient if they mostly run at night until something unexpected happens, when we will be happy to manually intervene to correct the timing", then this is not a solution. I've got a small patch which I would have first expected would do what you want, however the task is not as trivial as it seems. BackupPC schedules an incremental backup or a full one as appropriate. When a full one is due, it is rescheduled until it completes successfully, perhaps being skipped several times due to blackouts. In the mean time, there is no point in attempting incremental backups, because the same blackouts would apply. What you really want to happen when a full run is skipped due to a blackout period applying only to full backups is an incremental backup to be run instead. However, a manually scheduled full backup should probably not be automatically turned into an incremental. Overlapping blackout periods for full and incremental backups should work as expected, i.e. an incremental replacement backup should still be restricted by blackouts for incrementals, regardless of the order in which blackouts are specified. So there are some things to keep in mind. An additional problem is that, programmatically, BackupPC currently handles blackouts *before* making the decision whether a full or incremental backup is needed. There may be a good reason for that (such as avoiding pings during blackouts - pingCmd might attempt to wake up the remote host) or not, I'd have to take a closer look. In any case, it would be significantly more intrusive than changing two lines of code as my first attempt would have. Configuration wise, I would want to add an optional hash member backupType with supported values 'full', 'incr' or 'all', defaulting to 'all', which would make the blackout period apply to backups of the selected type(s), e.g.: $Conf{BlackoutPeriods} = [ { 'weekDays' => [ 1 .. 7 ], 'hourBegin' => 4, 'hourEnd' => 2, 'backupType' => 'full', }, { 'weekDays' => [ 1 .. 7 ], 'hourBegin' => 2, 'hourEnd' => 4, 'backupType' => 'incr', }, { 'weekDays' => [ 3 ], 'hourBegin' => 1, 'hourEnd' => 3, }, ]; (meaning no full backups from 04:00 to 02:00, no incremental backups from 02:00 to 04:00, no backups at all on wednesdays from 01:00 to 03:00, just to give an example). Ah, right, the web GUI would need to support setting this value, too :-). So, while I can appreciate the need for this feature and don't see a way to emulate it with current BackupPC capabilities, I can't offer you a solution right now. I would suggest trying something like triggering full backups with a cron job (and raising FullPeriod accordingly to avoid interfering automatic fulls) for now, though this is obviously only an approximation, too. You do realize that with your configuration the hourly incrementals will be growing deltas to the previous weekly full backup, right? That may not be a problem, but with hourly backups you probably need these to be really fast. Is retransmitting the same changes over and over again going to work for you? Hope this helps. Regards, Holger ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Dive into the World of Parallel Programming The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/