Scheduling Backups

Scheduling Backups

When thinking about which machines you are going to back up, you will probably think about file or application servers. Unfortunately, these machines get updates during the day, and the only moment it makes sense to back up these systems is after hours.
The reason for this is that backup products need to access files and back up a valid copy of these files. If these files are in use and modified during a backup, the backup version you have would not be very helpful when restored.

That is why you should determine a period of time in which operations on the machine that you will back up are minimal, and use this period of time to run the backup. This period is often referred to as the backup window .

You will soon see that this backup window starts somewhere late at night, and ends early in the morning, not exactly the time you or someone else wants to sit beside the machine and start or stop backup operations.

Luckily, backup programs make intense use of scheduling mechanisms. These schedulers allow you to start a backup at a certain point in time. The following points are important when automating the backup processes using schedulers:

•  What will my backup application do in case of  errors? Will it continue or stop? The worst case would be if the  application would stop and ask for a user intervention (which is not  available at that time).
•  Will operations and errors be logged  somewhere, so I can check if the backups were successful?
•  If the  backup operation takes longer than the defined backup window, will it  continue or stop?

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