Conditional Job Scheduling

[Thew]

It occurred to me the other day that in the pursuit of completely automating each aspect of my job, a way to achieve this would be if scheduled backup jobs would be if they could run on a conditional basis, for example:

• If day == Thursday, start backup job at 18:30. Otherwise, start backup job at 23:30.

Normally I set backup jobs run at the same time every day outside of business hours, as is standard practice. Part of my process for managing the infrastructure and backup services for multiple customers when applying software updates to servers is to manually run the backup job for all servers prior to the patching window, so in case the automated patching is still going by the time the backup job would normally start, it doesn't take a crash-consistent backup of a server mid-update. This makes it easier to restore in case something goes wrong, I can restore the state from immediately before the patch rather than needing to restore the previous day's backup.
After the backup job has run manually, I disable it so it doesn't run at its regular scheduled time, then once the updates are finished I need to remember to re-enable it.

I know it's possible to choose the days of the week the backup job will run, but to avoid having two separate jobs with a different backup chain, I don't think it's (currently) natively possible.

The example I included above - that's only on a weekly basis, but what if you wanted to run the backup job at a different time on a specific day of the month? i.e.

• If day == [First/Second/Third/Fourth] [S/M/Tue/W/Thur/F/Sat/Sun] of [J/F/Mar/Apr/May/June/July/Aug/S/O/N/D/All], start backup job at 18:30. Otherwise, start backup job as per primary conditions.

• If date == [1..31] of [J/F/M/A/M/J/J/A/S/O/N/D/All], start backup job at 18:30. Otherwise, start start backup job as per primary conditions.

'Primary conditions' here means the standard set of options the backup job wizard gives you when creating or editing a backup job.

There are probably other conditions that would be useful. How would you utilise conditional scheduling for your backup jobs, and do you think it's a good idea?

[david.domask]

Hi Matthew,

Understood on your idea, but consider setting the Backup Window instead. Effectively does the same thing, but sets up hard "allow" times for when the jobs can process data, and you can configure the window per day.

While this won't help for the requirement on specific times of the month, I think it covers the majority of patching situations, and combined with QuickBackup you can have your ad-hoc backups.

The request can be considered, but I would ask you to check with Backup Window and see if it better meets your needs for at least the weekly scheduling. My main concern with planning out such a schedule in advance is simply that "schedules change" but the job schedule might not get edited, and it's pretty easy to forget about.