On 01/03 10:19 , Anthony J Biacco wrote:
> I've read through the docs but still am not understanding the
> odd schedule of backup runs that are going on for my systems. Ideally I
> would like to see incrementals done sun-fri and fulls on sat. All
> starting about 12:30am each day.
it's not like traditional tape backup, where you set up a cron job to
initiate each backup at a particular time you choose. the software figures
out what needs to be done, then checks to see if it's allowable.
so if you haven't done a full backup for 7 days (the default), it'll
initiate a full backup next time it runs. It will check about once an hour,
and see if
- there's any job that needs to run
- if there's any blackout that would prevent the job from running
if you're using rsync for your backups (which works the best in most
situations), neither full nor incremental backups transfer all the data on
the machine. (the full backups just do more thorough checks on it). So it's
not that critical to schedule the jobs for a particular time.
I personally have no problem working on my workstation while a full backup
is going on. Then again, I have a dual-CPU linux machine. The Windows task
scheduler is nowhere near as good, and you may be more likely to run into
problems.
> But it seems they're all over the place, with days missed, which I don't
> quite understand.
if you look at the backuppc logs, you'll probably find that the missed days
were ones where other jobs took up all the available time between the
blackout hours.
you can alleviate this by making per-machine configurations with their own
blackout times (which override the one in config.pl). so for instance it may
happen that the boss doesn't arrive until 10am, and the backup of his
machine takes no more than an hour. you can allow his blackout period to go
as late at 9am (blackouts won't stop a job that's in the middle of running,
just prevent a job from starting). his machine could still be backed up
while others are prevented from doing so.
you may also try upping the number of backups running in parallel; but IME,
$Conf{MaxBackups} = 2 is just about right for LAN backups unless you have
some really high-end hardware. any more and the disk contention kills
performance.
if you insist on having backups done at a particular time on a
particular day; then you can schedule them in cron, using the
BackupPC_serverMesg tool.
# do incremental backups of this machine most every workday at noon
00 12 * * 1,2,3,4 backuppc /usr/share/backuppc/bin/BackupPC_serverMesg \
backup host.example.tld host.example.tld backuppc 0
# do a full backup on fridays
00 12 * * 5 backuppc /usr/share/backuppc/bin/BackupPC_serverMesg \
backup host.example.tld host.example.tld backuppc 1
be warned, trying to force things to happen at particular times can
easily lead to unexpected results, like too many jobs running
simultaneously. also keep in mind that this command won't absolutely force a
job to go off at this time; it's more of a suggestion to the server that it
do this backup now, if possible. I would advise you to do this sparingly.
it is also possible to run a backup job by hand, using the BackupPC_dump
command; but that is dangerous as it can lead to race conditions with some
of the housekeeping processes that BackupPC runs; so only use it for
troubleshooting and debugging.
--
Carl Soderstrom
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com
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