Schedule Considerations

The Arcserve UDP Agent (Windows) provides flexible settings to let you specify schedules for your backup. It consists of the following:

• Week-based repeat backup schedule
• Week-based backup throttling schedule
• Week-based merge schedule
• Daily backup schedule
• Weekly backup schedule
• Monthly backup schedule

However each backup, merge, or catalog job will consume system resources (CPU Usage, Memory Usage, IO Usage), occupy network bandwidth, and occupy disk space. Therefore, to help protect your system, consider the following:

What is the business processing time range of your server?

To avoid affecting your business processing, configure your system to run less jobs when the server is busy. For example, only configure to run backup jobs when the server is busy and leave merge jobs to run when the server is idle.

How about the data change frequency of your server?

Normally more frequent data change means more frequent backup is required. This is to reduce data lost to the minimum. When needed, you can recover the server to the last good known status.

How about your network bandwidth?

If your backup destination is configured to a network shared path, obviously the job occupies some of your network bandwidth when it is running. This might affect your business processing of this server. In case of this, specify a throttle schedule to limit the Arcserve UDP Agent (Windows) occupying network bandwidth.

How much disk storage is allocated for your backup destination?

More Full backups and more backups to retain means more disk storage is required. So when you configure how frequently to run a Full backup and how many backups to retain, consider the disk storage allocated for the backup destination.

How do you expect to use your backed up data?

Enable “File System Catalog” can shorten the browse time when you want to restore a file or a mailbox. But to generate catalogs, it also results in an increased amount of disk storage needed to store the metadata files and catalog files and an increase in CPU usage. In addition, if the backup source contains a large amount of files, the process of generating a catalog could be a time consuming task. So whether to enable or disable catalogs is depending on how you would like to use the backed up data.

Based on the above considerations, the following is an example of using advanced scheduling to protect a build server, showing the situation and corresponding schedule settings:

• The build server is used to provide source code pre-compile service every working day. It’s business process time slot is 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM of every work day (from Monday to Friday). During other times, it is idle.
• Schedule Settings:
• Configure to run custom incremental backup from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM, run merge job at night – 7:00 PM to 9:00 AM of next day.

• The pre-compile service is launched every 2 hours, and there are lots of data changes at that time.
• Schedule Settings:
• Configure to run custom incremental backup every 2 hours.

• Every time to run pre-compile, the build server need to fetch source code from a remote source code repository server.
• Schedule Settings:
• Limit backup throttle to 500 MB/Minute during 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM and no limitation during other time slots.

• Due to the poor disk storage, there is no requirement to retain a lot of recovery points. Only need to keep recovery points in one release cycle; 6 months is enough. But there is a requirement to keep the recovery point in the last 24 hours, so that once needed you can recover to the last good known status.
• Schedule Settings:
• Specify to retain last 12 manual backups (the backups of the last 24 hours).
• Configure to run Daily Incremental backup at 9:00 PM of every day. And keep the last 7 Daily backups.
• Configure to run Weekly Full Backup at 11:00 PM of every Friday. And keep the last 4 Weekly backups.
• Configure to run Monthly Full Backup at 12:00 PM on last Saturday of month. And keep the last 6 monthly backups.

• Finally, there are 6 monthly backups, 4 weekly backups, 7 daily backups and 12 most recent backups. There are enough choices to recover the build server to a good known status.

• For the build server, there is no requirement to quickly browse and restore files. Once needed, perform a BMR to restore the build server to the last good known status. That is enough.
• Schedule Settings:
• Disable options to generate "File System Catalog".