Public Holiday Date Exceptions

[Stone_Deaf]

Hi, I want to be able to exclude certain dates for backup jobs. I can do this in Backup Exec but can't see an option in Veeam Backup & Replication, any ideas as to workarounds? or if not, is this being considered for future releases? Thanks.

[Alexey D.]

Hello Nick,

Thanks for your feature request, maybe we will incorporate this functionality in the product, but not in the upcoming release.

As per workaround - just an idea - maybe you could write a poweshell script which would check whether current day is public holiday. If so, do nothing, otherwise - start jobs. Or, as another option, I would try Windows Task Scheduler and set days when to run the script starting the jobs. Hope it helps!

[Stone_Deaf]

ok thanks, would be a useful feature though!

[jasonboche]

I submitted a feature request for a much more granular job scheduler well over a year ago and referenced Symantec Backup Exec for a perfect/best case example. Veeam, if you want to be the king of backups, robust scheduler functionality is one of the keys. More flexibility is needed.

[Gostev]

Hi Jason, if you are implying that we ignored your feature request, then it is definitely not so. It is logged and we agree with it. However, when there are hunderds of features pending, it all comes done to priorities... some features get to wait. We are in the very competitive business with a very late start, and we need to make smart business decisions.

Let me put it the other way. Believe or not, but one of the reason we are beating Symantec today is because we do NOT have robust scheduler functionality. Of course, people are not naturally preferring us to Symantec because our scheduler is weak - the connection is more complex. Long explanation, but we can talk about this in person at VMworld in Vegas later this year. Maybe during traditional Veeam Vodka Party

[jamieorth]

Now that sounds like a conversation I would like to be in on.......

I can see both sides here (not that there are two sides). We use Symantec today for all our physical servers (yes, we still have them) and for dumping our Veeam backups to tape (yes, we havent got rid of it all just yet). The scheduling would be a nice feature but when looking at Veeam vs. Symantec and the virtual options it now has (in BE2010) it was the options that Veeam 5 brings to the table. Being a financial institution it is really nice to verify our backups and be able to prove to auditors that we do so on a regular basis. Veeam gives us that option and makes it easy to do so. I will gladly trade better scheduling just for that - and when they do improve the scheduling that will just make the product better.

On another note - this will be my first VMworld - year after year, waiting, job changes, kids, no conferences outside of Florida, finally going - and I can't wait!! See you guys there!

[Gostev]

Sounds good Jamie VMworld is great! If you shoot me a private message few weeks before VMworld, I will get you the Veeam Party invite!

[Giacomo_N]

Hi, I want to be able to exclude certain dates for backup jobs. I can do this in Backup Exec but can't see an option in Veeam Backup & Replication, any ideas as to workarounds? or if not, is this being considered for future releases? Thanks.

Hi, any update ? I need to stop some Veeam jobs during the company holidays, but i've found only manual mode by disable signle jobs..


Thanks

[veremin]

but i've found only manual mode by disable signle jobs

Hi, Giacomo. Instead of doing it manually, you can put into use PS. You can disable all backup/replication jobs using the following one-liner:

Code: Select all

(Get-VBRJob).disablescheduler()  

This one will enable everything back:

Code: Select all

(Get-VBRJob).enablescheduler()  

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[Giacomo_N]

Hi Vladimir,

thank you for the fast reply, one more question, if i apply that PS is it for all jobs? I need to stop only 3 jobs..

Thank you

[veremin]

Yep, the script provided above will disable every backup/replication job you have. If you’re willing to disable/enable only three of them, please explicitly specify their names in $names variable:

Disable

Code: Select all

Asnp VeeamPSSnapin 
$Names = "Backup job 1", "Backup Job 2","Backup Job 3"
Foreach ($Name in $Names)
{$Job = Get-VBRJob | ? {$_.name -eq $Name}
$Job.DisableScheduler()
} 

Enable

Code: Select all

Asnp VeeamPSSnapin 
$Names = "Backup job 1", "Backup Job 2","Backup Job 3"
Foreach ($Name in $Names)
{$Job = Get-VBRJob | ? {$_.name -eq $Name}
$Job.EnableScheduler()
}

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[Giacomo_N]

Vladimir u are the one!

I hope for the future a better integration inside the scheduler..

Thank u again and have a nice holydays:-)

[veremin]

And don’t forget that the aforesaid scripts can be scheduled via Windows Scheduler to run on a given holidays, etc; might do the trick you’re after. Thanks.

[yizhar]

Hi.

Just a small question:

Why at all do you want/need to disable the backup during holiday? Why not let it run?

Yizhar

[Giacomo_N]

Hi Yizhar,

Our company close for 3 weeks during August and only few people can connect from external.
Usually and until last year, with B.E. i need to stop the jobs because the tape library is 16 slots.
Now with Veeam and D2D architecture is different, but why lose 21 restoration points of my retention during company holydays?

Giacomo

[Gostev]

One thing to consider here is that the restore points taken during public holidays will contain very little data (since there will be no changes), and thus should consume negligible amount of space in your backup repositories, which is why implementing this feature adds relatively little value to the product. It's all about value to the product, this is what defines feature priorities here at Veeam.

By the way, if you shutdown some VMs, they will not be generate any changes at all. However, if you keep them running because some people still logon remotely to do stuff, you certainly want to keep backing them up.

[yizhar]

Hi Yizhar,
Our company close for 3 weeks during August and only few people can connect from external.

In that case, you can change the schedule to weekly or every 2-3 days, or increase the retension points cound.
You should keep backuping up servers during holidyas.
I guess that mail server is running, accounting/management might need to work during holidays even if it is for "little" but very important things.

Nowdays closing the office doesn't mean stopping servers normally, so backup should keep running as well.

Yizhar

[Giacomo_N]

Yizhar, you are right!

I'll increase the retention point.


Thank you

[FabriceMagier]

Hi Yizhar,

Our company close for 3 weeks during August and only few people can connect from external.
Usually and until last year, with B.E. i need to stop the jobs because the tape library is 16 slots.
Now with Veeam and D2D architecture is different, but why lose 21 restoration points of my retention during company holydays?

Giacomo

Hye,

Our company close like you and i don't want to backup to tape all the hollidays but just one per week (or for example no backup the 01/01, 01/05, 08/05, 01/11, 11/11 and 25/12, and more...) .
Its neccessary to add calendar backup in Veeam Backup for entreprise...
(excuse me for my bad english but i'm...french !!)

Fab

[Aerospace]

we need this feature too...

[Ottrott]

As yesterday was a holiday here in Germany I get some end user calls regarding the tape handling. Especially in small environments when there is no dedicated administrator the users like the idea that a "popped out" tape shows that the backup job normally has been finished. On normal work days this is fine - as the user changes the tape and the job can run during the next night. But on holidays (when they appear during the week) this stalls the jobs in the next night. How about an option to add "exclusion dates" in generally or especially for the tape jobs? Prohibiting that a tape job is started on these special dates. As the first level of the job normally is connected to a storage / NAS whatever it would be nice to have this option for a tape job. Maybe even when the tape job is started as a chained / scripted job?

[PTide]

Hi,

Good point, however I have a questions in regards to your feature request - apparently you are talking about some set date holidays, what about holidays that are not date specific? For example Thanksgiving in US? How would you suggest to handle it?

Thank you.

[foggy]

They could be set manually according to the holiday calendar adopted in a company (there could be not even public days off as well).

[Ottrott]

Hi,

how about a date picker? So you can choose the exclusion dates freely. The only thing to do is setting the dates for 1 or 2 years in advance (and not to forget to renew these exclusions...). I know this function for other vendors / products. As I said - this would be handy for smaller environments. In environments with tape loaders etc. this is not of much use.

[jdehn]

Hey everyone!

I would also like to get something like a scheduling calendar for exceptions.
Our company handled it in that way with the old backup software (WD Arkeia):
In december one of the administrators creates a new backup plan for the new year. So we got an excel sheet where we write the tape number for each day that have to be inserted in the evening. All the holidays are marked in the calendar, because no one can change the tape on this days. Now we have a summary when a backup have to run and when not to. So we opened the backup scheduling calendar in Arkeia and marked all days on wich no backup have to run (we had to do that for every backup job).

It would be really great if we could do that in Veeam, too. The problem is that we got a single drive streamer and have to change the tapes manually. On holidays no one can change the tapes and Veeam goes into an error..

Best regards, jdehn

[radion]

Hey,

we would also like to see a possibility to set holiday exceptions especially for tape jobs.

Is there a way to use the "Disable/Enable Scheduler" command, posted by Vladimir, for tape jobs?

Thank you

[PTide]

Hi,

Please use this

Code: Select all

$tape = Get-VBRTapeJob -Name "Backup to Tape Job 1"
Disable-VBRJobSchedule -Job $tape

Thanks

[DBecker]

While the script might be a good work-around for some/many, I could not get it to work. In addition, that is something else that I need to change. I would be better for those of us in small IT shops (read: 1 IT person for the company) if this was built into the software like it is in Backup Exec. I like Veeam better in most instances, but this is one of those times that you competitors has it right. Being able to tell the software to ignore all jobs beginning at noon on "date A" and then pick back up at noon on "Date B," and to be able to do this at the beginning of the year when we know what our holiday schedule, is a big productivity boost. It would definitely be a huge help for us.

[veremin]

While the script might be a good work-around for some/many, I could not get it to work.

What particular issue did you get while working with a script? Didn't it do its job or didn't it start at all? Thanks.

[DBecker]

On the first run of the script it did in fact shut down the tape job. However the script to enable the tape jobs did not work at all, and any subsequent running of the script to shut the tape jobs down did not work.