The scheduler built in to Data Protector while highly functional still lacks the ability to schedule recurring backups for certain very specific scenarios. I suppose there will always be room for improvement in the eyes of somebody. Though it might be easy to dwell upon the negative, I would rather light a candle than curse your darkness!
Remember a few months ago when I shared with you Paul's technique for scheduling a recurring backup for the first Saturday of each month? Recently, I encountered a scenario that takes the strategy one step farther. In that case, we wanted a backup early in the morning on the first Saturday of each month. So that schedule file came straight out of my previous example. What took some doing was scheduling the copy job for the very next day, Sunday without ever letting a week lapse between backup and copy.
It is at this point that I must give credit to my friend and colleague Jason Lingenfelter. After some brief experimentation, It was his clever eye that formulated the final solution. Below is an overlay of the backup schedule and the copy schedule.
Why, you might wonder, did we not simply set the copy as a post-backup job? Customer requirements were such that a delay was desired between the backup and the object copy. The caveat was that the delay be a few hours, but not more than a day. Hence the reason why we wanted the copy job to always fall on the Sunday following the "first Saturday" backup.
The GUI parses the schedule files just fine. Here we have the backup schedule which is located in ProgramData\OmniBack\Config\Server\Schedules.
And the corresponding copy schedule that resides in ProgramData\OmniBack\Config\Server\copylists\sched
It doesn't matter how far out you browse in each schedule, the relationship holds in perpetuity. Set it and forget it. That's the way we like it.
Do you have any clever scheduling hacks? If so, please share them in the comments!
