Day selection for backup copy jobs

[jlipari]

I'm curious why backup copy jobs don't have an option to choose what day(s) to run. Is this not a feature others would find useful?

I'd like to have a backup copy job run one specific day a week. I don't want to use the "job can transfer data" settings to define time periods, because I want the job to finish, no matter how long it takes to run.

Thanks

[foggy]

Are you talking about Immediate or Periodic mode? For the latter, you can just create the job on that day so that its first run is executed on the desired day of the week. If you set the copy interval to 7 days, it will continue in this manner. For the former, there's no intervals and it syncs the restore points immediately, once they appear on source.

[jlipari]

Sorry - Periodic.

Thanks

[foggy]

Then the day the job has first started will be the day it will start each week further on.

[jlipari]

This doesn't seem to work.

Not matter what I do, the job just keeps trying to run immediately from a previous schedule. I change to 1 day, then back to 7 days, with a time in the future, I restart the job, disable and reenable the job, try sync now, and it just keeps trying to run immediately.

It really seems like a option is needed here to manually define a day. It seems silly to have to wait until the day you want it to run to set it.

[soncscy]

Hey Jipari,

When you say "running", what do you mean? With the old periodic mode, the Backup Copy can just sit there idle but not actually moving anything, so it will be "active", but it's not really active.

You need to think of backup copy as a watcher that looks for new restore points to make a copy of. My experience with immediate mode and backup windows suggests that you can get some success with this.

But I think we're looking at this the wrong way; backup copy isn't a 1:1 copy of the source files, it's a "backup of a backup", meaning that it makes a point which reflects the status of the original VM that most closely represents the interval. With immediate mode, you just get a copy of every single point as soon as it's made. With periodic, it only moves points that "best match" a specific interval.

Periodic is closer to what you're wanting, but I actually wonder why you desire this. Increments should be very small, and unless you're working with exceptionally limited bandwidth (< 20 Mbps I'd say), you can likely support it.

[jlipari]

The job was actively copying data, and would restart copying data every time I restarted the job, or tried the sync now option, even thought it was set to run at a time in the future.

I have limited bandwidth, and don't want the job running every day.

Thanks

[veremin]

But has a job had at least one successful run? Also, why not to follow Foggy's advice and create a job on the day you want to run it? Thanks!

[jlipari]

Again, it seems pretty silly that you would have to wait until the day of the week you want the job to run on every week to schedule it for the first time, instead of being able to schedule in advance, on the day you're actually setting the server up.

The jobs have had successful runs. I followed Foggy's advice, and started the job the day I wanted it to run every week. That worked at first, but not long term. It seems that once the job failed to run once as scheduled, due to the remote serve being unreachable, it started another day, once the server was reachable, and the job now runs every 7 days from that day. So, every time there's an issue, the job is going to start running every 7 days on a different day it seems.

There should be a way to schedule a backup copy job to only start running on a specific day. Does this not exist?

Thanks

[foggy]

Other than using the backup window setting to allow only the desired period you could also disable the job and script it to be triggered on the specified day only.

[jlipari]

I disabled the job, and tried running with a script, but it doesn't seem to run. I noticed that Sync now and Active full are both grayed out when I right click on the disabled job. Am I missing something, or is it not possible to run a disabled backup copy job?

Thanks

[Mildur]

You can use a script to enable it on the choosen day, start a sync, and as soon the status goes to idle disable it again.

[jlipari]

Got it, thanks!

[veremin]

Am I missing something, or is it not possible to run a disabled backup copy job?

It is not possible to run operations on a disabled job, so within a script you have to enable it first (Enable-VBRJob) and disable it afterwards (Disable-VBRJob). Thanks!