Creating Plans to Protect Data › How to Create a File Copy Plan › Create a Plan with a Backup Task › Specify the Schedule › Understanding Advanced Scheduling and Retention

Understanding Advanced Scheduling and Retention

The scheduling option lets you specify a Custom schedule or a Daily / Weekly / Monthly schedule, or both the schedules. In the Custom schedule, you can configure the backup schedule for each day of the week and you can add up to four backup schedules each day. You can select a specific day of a week and create a time window to define when to run backup and at what frequency.

You can also specify the retention settings for the recovery points.

Note: Retention settings must be set within each plan to control how data for the nodes assigned to that plan are retained at the target data store.

Schedules for Daily / Weekly / Monthly backups are independent to the Custom schedule, and each other. You can configure only to run Daily backup, Weekly backup or Monthly backup, without configuring the Custom schedule.

Backup Job Schedule

You can add four time windows per day in your backup schedule. A valid time window is from 12:00 AM until 11:59 PM. You cannot specify a time window such as 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM. In such cases, you have to manually specify two different time windows.

For each time window, the start time is inclusive, and the end time is exclusive. For example, you have configured to run Incremental Backup every one hour between 6:00 AM and 9:00 AM and the backup will start at 6:00 AM. This means the backup will run at 6:00 AM, 7:00 AM, 8:00 AM, but NOT 9:00 AM.

Note: If you want to run the backup job repeatedly until the end of day, set the schedule until 12:00 AM. For example, to run backup job every 15 minutes for the entire day, set the schedule from 12:00 AM to 12:00 AM, every 15 minutes.

Backup Throttle Schedule

Backup throttle schedule lets you control the backup throughput speed, which in turn controls the resource usage (disk I/O, CPU, network bandwidth) of the server being backed up. This is useful if you do not want to affect the server performance during business hours. You can add four time windows per day in your backup throttle schedule. For each time window, you can specify a value, in MB per minute. This value will be used to control the backup throughput. Valid values are from 1 MB/minutes to 99999 MB/minutes.

If a backup job extends its specified time, then the throttle limit will adjust according to the specified time window. For example, you have defined the backup throttle limit as 500 MB/minute from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM, and 2500 MB/minute from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM. If a backup job starts at 7:00 PM and it runs for three hours, then, from 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM the throttle limit will be 500 MB/minute and from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM the throttle limit will be 2500 MB/minute.

If you do not define any backup schedule and backup throughput schedule, the backup will run as fast as it can.

Merge Schedule

Lets you merge recovery points based on the provided schedule.

Consider the following points for the merge job:

• At any given time only one merge job can run for a node.
• If a merge job starts, it has to complete before the next merge job can start. This means, if one or more sets of recovery points are being merged, new recovery point cannot be added to this merge process, until the merge process of the current set of recovery point completes.
• If a merge job is processing more than one set of recovery points (for example set [1~4], set [5~11], and set [12~14]; they are three sets), recovery point server will process these sets one by one.
• If a merge job is resumed after a pause, the job detects at which point it was paused and resumes the merge from the break-point.