Scheduling Question!

Hi Everybody

I stumbled across this product and I am trialling it at the moment. Looks good so far.

One of most fundamental requirements I have is to be able to :-

1. Perform event triggered scheduled backups viz Scheduling Full/differential backups at "Shutdowns" and/or "LogOffs" rather than time triggered scheduled backups and
2. Confirm before backup begins and
3. Run both Before and After backup batch files

I want to backup to an external USB hard disk drive.


This is what I want essentially want to do :-
1. Run a weekly (on Sunday nights) full backup keeping a maximum of 2 full backup copies - that is full backup copies for the 2 immediate past weeks
2. Run a daily (every other night except on Sunday) differential backup keeping one 1 backup copy of the differential backup for each of these days -to be overwritten by the corresponding differential backup of next week.

Both these backup jobs are to be run at "Shutdown" or at "LogOff". However, the backup job is only to be done on user confirmation & not at every "Shutdown" and on every "LogOff" - hence the need for "Confirmation Before Backup" option.


Any suggestions please? I couldn't find anything which I could relate to answer all of these questions of mine.



Best regards




Deepak Agarwal

 

One of the moderators has posted a guide to building a set of scripts that does something similar to what you want -- see http://ftp.paragon.eu.com/US/DB/DB10_Custom_Cyclic_Backup.pdf. The scheme in this guide automatically keeps the past two full backups and differential backups for each day for the past two weeks. If you don't want two weeks of differential backups, you could use the first half of the guide to create one full backup and a week's worth of differential backups and then prepend a batch operation to move the full backup to a fixed "previous week" location whenever you create a new full backup.

To schedule this operation on logoff, I think you will have to interact with the Windows task scheduler. DB10's scheduler creates a task for the Windows task scheduler. Once it has been created by DB10, you can view it and modify its settings directly from Windows' task scheduler. How you set it to be triggered by a logoff probably varies between the different versions of Windows. Someone else will have to speak to your issue of making the full backup optional.

DB10 has one surprising characteristic vis a vis differential backups. As you probably expect the storage required is considerably less than for a full backup. However the time required is similar to a full system backup. Apparently DB10 checks every sector to see if it has been modified, so a differential backup reads as much data as a full image backup; it just writes much less. DB10 is considerably faster than some other backup programs, so this may not be an issue. But you might decide that it is simpler and sufficient to run the two week schedule in the guide referenced above rather than to add tweaks to make things optional.

 

agarwaldvk,

The Windows task scheduler does not have option to run a task at shutdown or logoff.

What version/edition of Windows are you running ??

... If you are running a professional edition of Windows (professional, business, ultimate), then you can have windows run a shutdown script and logoff script. However, this option is not available if your running a Home or Basic Edition of Windows.

... Assuming that your running a professional or higher edition of windows, you could then create a batch file script and enter a line into it to execute your paragon backup script. Also, you can place the batch file "choice" command to prompt whether to continue executiing the batch file script and execute your paragon backup script or whether to skip over the lscript line that would perform the paragon backup.
(P.S. The "choice" command is not installed when Win XP is installed on a PC, but you can get it from the Windows XP installation CD in the support\tools directory (or download from microsoft the "windows xp - resource kit tools"). I heard that the Choice command is back in the install of Vista and Windows 7.)

 

Windows 7 Ultimate's task scheduler has options for nine different kinds of events, including "disconnect from user session". I don't know if that equates to "logoff". "Logon" is one of the events. "Shutdown" is not. So JosephB's advice may be required to do what you want.

 

agarwaldvk,

Actually, I have to correct something that I stated above. I have a feeling that under Vista and Win 7 the script that you run at logoff or shutdown can not be interactive and this will not be able to interact with the user, due to change of increased security desgn of vista/win 7. So, I do not think that the choice command will work in the shutdown or logoff script of the above method. I do not have access to a Win 7 pc to test this.

.... So I am afraid you will not be able to do what you want with my method.

.... However, if you are using Win 7, DrumMemory said that Win 7 task scheduler has an event option of "disconnect from user session" (BTW, this option is probably also available on Vista's Task scheduler, since many changes were added to the task scheduler starting with Vista), so you may be able to use that approach to schedule the batch file with the choice command interaction to work, as the task scheduler is running under your user session. But, I am not sure. Someone with Win 7/Vista would have to try it to determine if it works or not.

... In the long run, it might just be easier to schedule the paragon backup job to run in the wee hours of the morning and check on the paragon scheduling option of "shutdown" computer upon completion of the backup job (or leave shutdown option un-checked and set windows standby/sleep mode to automatically standby/sleep when not pc "active" for xx minutes).