sensible schedule / backup strategy

dear all,

i'm looking for a sensible way to schedule backup tasks for my office machine.
what i would like to have is:

• in the first week, start with a full backup set A on monday, and do incremental backups on tuesday->friday
• in the second week, start with a full backup set B on monday, ... (see above).
• in the third week, go back to backup set A.

in my opinion that would effectively get me at least a weeks worth of backups, while space consumption for the 'worst case', i.e. friday of week B, is still acceptable.

any thoughts on that?
any suggestions how to implement it either with the ATI workstation 9.1 scheduler?
or with an alternate (free) scheduling technique?
any suggestions on a much more sensible strategy?

thanks in advance,

andreas f.

 

Are you taking about a single user office machine or a network sever?

 

i'm talking about my office machine, which in fact is a laptop and is used off-site every once in a while.

thanks for your interrest.

andreas f.

 

You want a full disk image run every two weeks on alternating weeks (two tasks each run every two weeks on alternate weeks - call the image files something like 'week1' and 'week2'). Then set up incrementals nightly (week 1) and then repeat it set up the same way the following week (week 2). You will use 4 tasks to accomplish this - two full (full week1 and full week2) and two incrementals (increm week1 and increm week2). This gives the added advantage of two full backup images at any one time in case of corruption. If you need a longer time frame than that, set up a fifth task for a full image on the first of the month repeating monthly.

If set up properly, the images will remain but overwrite previous ones. You will need to refer to the dates to make sure each incremental belongs to the set. You could have a pre-full task command to delete the contents of a directory holding one week images to start without previous images in the directory.

 

I'm looking to do the same thing but it doesn't appear that the TI scheduler is robust enough to do this.

Is there a way to do this with the Windows scheduler? Should I create a one-time task and copy the file or something?

I'm using Enterprise Server btw

Thanks

 

You could adapt the following which has served me well for quite some time. It effectively gives me an automated rolling daily backup going back over the last month.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=846178

F.

 

Let me add a Question:

How is it possible to schedule Tasks alternativly to execute only every x week ? I can select every week, every 2 weeks wtc.

But how can I tell a task to execute next week the first time ?
Or how can I keep the scedule if the system does not run for a longer times (1 to 3 weeks) i.e. due to holidays ?

Is there any possibility to modify the "next scedule time" directly ?

McM

 

For most of this I think you are stepping outside the bounds of what is possible using the ATI scheduler. If you really want to be ultra flexible you need to program your own scheduler (or run batch files from the Windows scheduler) and invoke task definitions via the command line.

F.

 

Thanks for the feedback.
I wasn't sure whether I missed som information

McM

 

Foghorne, using your strategy with TI Home 9.0
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=846178

Am I correct that after 7 weeks I'm going to have an entire month of daily backups in each of the subdirectories, because every day an incremental backup is getting posted to each of those subdirectories?

If my thinking is erroneous on this, then I'm missing something, which is how to limit the incremental backups to the specific week of the month.

 

Not sure about the 7 weeks, I think my schedule was setup over four weeks. However; yes in each folder there will be a month of backups starting from the date of the full backup for that particular folder. I don't find this a problem, once it has completed its first cycle I don't see much increase in disk usage, but this will obviously depend on how much new stuff you are adding to your disk and how often you do it.

F.