Backup Copy job - adjusting run of longer intervals

[skrause]

Our organizational retention policies require:

2 weeks of nightly backups on disk
5 weeks of weekly backups
6 months of monthly backups (off site tape)

To accomplish this, we have storage local in our main datacenters that the nightly backups go to and then we have storage in a third location which we use as the target for backup copy jobs of the critical VMs with a 7 day interval. These backup copy jobs are then the source for our monthly tapes. We cannot do GFS for these copies as we do not have the disk space to keep 5 full backup files, nor do we have enough available bandwidth or disk space to run a nightly job and keep 35 restore points (one of the critical systems has a very high change rate). When setting up the copy jobs initially, I set them up on different days with a 7 day copy interval. A couple of jobs would run on Monday, a couple on Tuesday, etc.

Recently, the copy interval somehow got messed up and all of the jobs are running their copy interval so that they run on Tuesdays which causes them to run longer as they use up the available bandwidth (throttled to not impact other operations in the location) and the transform at the end takes longer because there are other jobs writing to the disk that used to run on different days.

I tried to get them back on the days they are "supposed" to run by doing the "Sync now" option on one job yesterday which from the documentation looked like was the only option to get the jobs back on the correct days. When I came back from lunch today I noticed that the job I ran yesterday was running which now means I have lost a week of my retention (not a huge deal since the 5 weeks are just to make sure we have disk back to the last tape).

How do I force the copy interval to change its start time on a job that runs with this kind of delay?

Ideally, there would be an option to schedule a backup copy job to run on a given schedule while still performing the forever-forward style on disk.

[Gostev]

How do I force the copy interval to change its start time on a job that runs with this kind of delay?

You should use Sync Now after the primary backup job creates the restore point that you want to sync every 7 days. For example, if you want to ship every Friday night backup off-site, you should use Sync Now on Saturday. Thanks!

[skrause]

That is what I did on Monday and it still ran on Tuesday.

[foggy]

Actually, the process of changing the day your weekly interval starts is a bit more tricky: on the day you want it to be started, you need first to change the interval to, say, 1 day and click Sync Now, then (no need to wait for the job cycle to finish) change the interval to the required 7 days and click Sync Now again. Next intervals will be started on the required day.

[skrause]

Fun!

Thanks, foggy.

Can I feature request some better usability for scheduling backup copy jobs that don't occur daily?

[foggy]

Sure, you can. Thanks for your feedback.

[drew.swan]

Hi,

I currently have a 7 day interval Backup copy job that saves files to cloud connect repo. Currently the interval seems to start on a thursday as the restore points always are the wednesday backups.

We have a requirement to change this to capture backup jobs that were run on a sunday - I guess making the interval go Monday to Sunday. Is there an easy way to reset the day the interval starts? We dont want to reseed the job. I did have a look in the manual but it is not clear how to do this.

Thanks,
Drew

[foggy]

Hello Drew, please review above for the procedure on changing the interval start day. Thanks.