v11 GFS scheduling

[jeff.richeson]

Just updated to v11. We have backup copy jobs to an offsite location with monthly GFS retention. Due to slow transfer speeds to the offsite location, we had a quarter of our machines do the full backup on the first weekend, another quarter for the second weekend, and so on. This allowed us to spread out the large data transfers throughout the entire month. It looks like all that flexibility is gone. Am I missing something?

[Gostev]

You should still be able to specify the week of the month when monthly GFS backup should be created.

[jeff.richeson]

I'm not doing weekly fulls and only keeping active full monthly backups. I do not see any way to specify the week of the month beyond first or last. Currently all the machines are trying to do another full backup and I'm assuming in a few of days (when a new month begins), they will all try to do it again. I really need a way to spread this out throughout the month.

[Gostev]

@Egor Yakovlev I did not realize the only options are First and Last week there... could you check if we can add Second/Third/Fourth options too, like we have in other features which can be scheduled to run monthly?

[jeff.richeson]

Even with first/last of the month, I don't have any way to limit the full to starting on weekends. It looks like the expectation is that I would create a weekly that then get tagged as monthly and yearly. Unfortunately, I have too much data and not enough bandwidth to do weekly active fulls.

[Gostev]

Most of our customers do weekly synthetic fulls. These don't take any physical disk space or bandwidth (assuming you are using ReFS or XFS repository).

[jeff.richeson]

The current format is ext4. I don't currently have room for weekly synthetic fulls. When I originally configured these off-site backups, I was running synthetic fulls but the merging operations took too long. Being able to have fine-grained scheduling of the monthly fulls was very handy. Are synthetic fulls my only viable option now?

[Gostev]

Sounds like it. Just switch from ext4 to XFS so that those synthetic fulls don't require any room and for merges to complete super fast.

[Egor Yakovlev]

...add Second/Third options too...

Sure. Will discuss with Devs and QA!