Monthly Active Fulls get missed occasionally

[McKITGuys]

Hi all,

On one of our backup sets, I seem to keep getting a "miss" for the monthly active full backups and I figure it has something to do with time of day and/or day of week. Here is the setup:

Mon - Fri, 10:00 pm, chained backup set:
1) Set A
2) Set B
3) Set C
4) Set D

- all are set to do an active full on last Friday of the month
- monthly full backups on Sets A to C all work but they don't always finish before midnight so
- Set D has the problem: when I had this set to "Last Friday", it seemed to miss creating an active full
- this past March month-end I set it to "Last Saturday" thinking that since Sets A to C went over midnight, then VBR must "read" the backup date as of Saturday since it is not starting until Saturday and then it "figures out" that the .vbk should be created

Here are some times for Friday March 31:
1) Set A finished at 10:25 pm - active full created (.vbk)
2) Set B finished at 10:40 pm - active full created (.vbk)
3) Set C finished at 1:25 am (next day) - - active full created (.vbk)
4) Set D finished at 1:30 am but an active full was not created - just the .vib incremental

Can you explain the algorithm that decides when to the active full and/or what I should change Set D to above to get an active full at the end of the month?

Thanks.

[HannesK]

Hello,

chained backup set:

what you see is one of the reasons why "job chaining" is not recommended in general The same topic was discussed here, just with synthetic fulls.

You could fix it by stop using job chaining and just start the jobs after each other by schedule (10:00pm, 10:01pm, 10:02pm, 10:03pm). Task limits on proxy and repository will prevent overloading the infrastructure and the jobs will wait until resources are free.

Best regards,
Hannes

[McKITGuys]

Thanks for the response...and, that was an action-packed, informative thread re job chaining

I was leaning towards hiving off at least the problem job anyhow so that it only runs on Saturdays by itself. I will look at unchaining them all as well as that might be best long term.

[McKITGuys]

So just to make sure, if I schedule all backups to start at staggered times as suggested and if my Job D which is scheduled to start at say 11:30 pm on a Friday but it does not start because resources are not yet available, and it has its active full monthly set to last Friday of the month, will that active full take place or not? Just checking...

[HannesK]

yes, the job will write something like "waiting for resources..." and the full will happen.