Best Practices for Off-Hours Copy\Backup Copy Scheduling

[servicebkm]

I work for a small business that has basically no activity outside 7a-5p. For that reason I setup a backup job for an small SQL server to complete every 30 minutes 6a-6p, and midnight. Average job time is like 5 minutes.

I also setup a backup copy job for archives every 4 hours, and a separate backup copy job for offsite backup/DR every hour. It works fine during the day, but overnight or early morning I almost always get error about the copy interval not completing. It looks like occasionally the copy job isn't finding any new points overnight, because there aren't any, but a new point appears and is being created once 6a hits and the copy job can't copy it yet because it is locked still, and this throws the error, but then it automatically starts its new interval and copies fine, usually in just a few minutes.

The backups are all fine, but the errors make it look sloppy to management. Is there way to turn off that specific error? Or should I just set the backup job to backup 24/7, instead of just 6a-6p M-F? I guess I just assumed that fewer restore points would be better, but maybe that doesn't matter much? 24 x 7 x 2 would be 336 incrementals, then it would create a new active full over the weekend.

I searched through the documentation and I could find anything that talked mentioned anything about how many incrementals affects how much performance, specifically for restores and instant VM recoveries. I also couldn't find anything about best practices for copy/backup copy schedules in relation to off-hours.

Thank you.

[foggy]

Hi David, if the backup copy job doesn't find new restore point created within the specified copy interval, it is expected for it to throw such error messages. You can configure it in the way that it doesn't process data when new restore points are not created to avoid these messages.

As for the chain length, you can find some information on the forum, for example, in this post.