Overview
Schedules contain information on when backups are to be performed and how long each backup is to be kept. The data in a schedule includes:
- Triggers that define when backups should be taken and what level of backup (full, differential, incremental).
- Retention rules describing how long, or how many backups, should be kept before old backups are removed.
- Options for advanced behaviors, including how offline computers should be handled, retrying failed backups, power saving options, and backup notifications.
Schedules can be created and managed on the 'Schedules' page of SiteBackup. If no schedules exist in SiteBackup, a quick help page will be shown instead:
Default Schedules
On the initial guidance page for schedules, there is an option to create a set of default schedules. These defaults can be edited and modified once created to match the exact scheduling requirements, read more about editing and managing schedules here. The default schedules are:
- Grandfather, Father, Son - Daily incremental ("Son"), weekly differential ("Father"), and monthly full ("Grandfather") backups.
- Differential Backup Set - A full backup is created periodically followed by daily differential backups.
- Incremental Backup Set - A full backup is created periodically followed by daily incremental backups.
- Incrementals Forever - Incrementals forever optimizes backup space and time by only ever creating a single full backup.
After this, incremental backups are created ad infinitum. The full backup is consolidated with subsequent incremental backups once the specified number of incremental backups is reached.
This is also known as a synthetic full backup. - Intra-Daily Backup Set - Monthly full backups, daily differential backups, and incremental backups every 15 minutes during working hours. Differentials are retained for 4 weeks., Full images for 6 months.
Creating a Schedule
Entirely custom schedules can be created to ensure that the schedule is a good fit for the SiteBackup environment. To create a schedule, select 'New Schedule' above the list of existing schedules:
Title
On this page of the 'Add Schedule' wizard, a name for the schedule must be entered, this is for display purposes to help distinguish between existing schedules. An optional description can also be entered.
Triggers
Triggers are configured on the second page of the wizard. A trigger is made up of an 'Operation' (the type of backup that will be performed), a 'Start Date', and a 'Type' (the interval in which the backup will be created).
To add a trigger, select 'New Trigger'. The trigger can then be configured in the window that opens:
The 'Add Trigger' dialog has a number of options for creating the trigger. These are shown in the table below:
|
Option
|
Description
|
|---|---|
| Operation |
Which level of backup to perform when this trigger initiates a backup. This can be full, differential, or incremental. If a trigger fires for an incremental or differential backup, but no full backup exists in the repository to base the differential or incremental backup on, the backup is automatically converted to a full backup. |
| Start Time |
The time of day the backup operation will occur. If a backup is delayed because another backup is running, the backup will run as soon as possible. |
| Start Date | The date when the trigger starts. The trigger will not initiate a backup before this date. This is useful to ensure that complex rules start at the right time. For example, making sure a trigger for an incremental backup on Tuesdays doesn't occur before a full backup trigger on Fridays. |
| Trigger Type |
The type of trigger - the options are listed below in the 'Trigger Details' section. |
| Trigger Details |
The panel changes depending on the trigger type;
|
Once the trigger has been configured, select 'OK', the trigger will then be shown in the 'Triggers' page:
Multiple triggers can be configured as part of the same schedule, enabling more complex schedules to be created. Each trigger listed has an 'Edit' button to re-open the trigger creation dialog to edit the trigger and a 'Delete' button to remove the trigger.
Conflicting Triggers
When triggers occur at the same time, only one backup is taken, with the more thorough backup taking precedence: full over differential and differential over incremental. For example: given a weekly full backup trigger which occurs at 10:00 PM and a daily incremental backup trigger at the same time, the full backup will take precedence and run. This allows for simpler trigger creation - for example, a weekly and daily trigger which overlap rather than two weekly triggers, one for one day and the other for all other days of the week.
Once the triggers have been configured, select 'Next'. At least one trigger must be present to continue onto the next page of the wizard.
Retention Rules
Retention rules control how long backups, or how many backups, are kept in the repository at any one time before being deleted to conserve storage space:
The 'Rules' section contains the retention rules for each backup type. If the checkbox next to each rule is checked the retention rules will be applied for that backup level. When a backup is performed if there are any backups older than the time period or count of backups specified in the dropdown boxes, they will be deleted. If the checkbox is left unchecked, the retention rules will not be applied to that backup type.
Retention rules are applied on a per-computer basis. If a retention rule is configured to keep 10 full backups, 10 full backups will be retained per computer that is backed up using this schedule.
The 'Options' section of the page contains additional settings for how retention rules are applied:
|
Option
|
Description
|
|---|---|
| Create a Synthetic Full Backup if possible |
If this option is checked, instead of deleting incremental backup files once they have reached the limit of retention, they are merged into the full backup they are based on, creating a new full backup containing all the data up to the merge point. This option only applies to backup plans such as 'Incrementals Forever' where a single full backup is followed by frequent incremental backups. The retention rule for incremental backups must be enabled and set to 'Backups' mode for this option to become available.
|
| Run the purge before backup |
This option applies retention rules and deletes any files according to retention rules before the backup starts. This keeps repository space usage lower prior to a backup taking place but may result in computers being left without backups in the event of a backup failure.
|
Options
The 'Options' page provides additional control for how the scheduled backups are run, including what happens if a computer is offline when the scheduled backup triggers, if a backup fails, and post-backup power saving options.
The full list of options on this page is shown in the table below:
|
Option
|
Description
|
|---|---|
| Defer backups until computer is online |
If this option is selected, scheduled backups cannot be performed because a computer is offline will be performed when the computer comes back online. If the option is unchecked, scheduled backups will fail if the computer is offline. The backup will run again when it is next scheduled to. |
| Send Wake On LAN message before backup |
If this option is selected, SiteBackup will attempt to use Wake On LAN to wake offline computers before starting a backup. If Wake On LAN attempts fail, it will behave as the 'Fail backups for offline computers' option Additionally, UDP port, number of wake attempts, and time between attempts can be set. |
| Fail backups for offline computers | If this option is selected, backups will be failed if the computer is offline and the computer will not perform a backup until the next trigger time or next retry time as set below. |
| Enable power saving options |
If this option is selected, the computer can be set to shutdown, hibernate, suspend, or reboot after completing a backup. The computer can also be forced to close all programs. |
| Retry backups which fail | If a backup attempt fails, it can be retried up to the number of times specified here. |
| Allow X minutes between attempts of failed backups | The amount of time that SiteBackup will wait between backup attempts. Can be set to between 2 and 120 minutes. Backups of other computers may occur between the retries. |
| Active Hours | When enabled, scheduled backups will only be sent to the agent between the start and end time specified. If the start and end times are the same, then the active period is 24 hours. Any scheduled or queued backups that fall outside of the active hours will be deferred until the next active hours window is reached. |
| Intra-daily Stealth Mode | When intra-daily stealth mode is enabled, backups that are triggered by intra-daily triggers will only create backup logs if there is an error or if new files/folders have been found (for file and folder backups). Instead of logs, the logs view will show a daily summary for each computer backed up |
| Disable Agent Notifications | When enabled, pop-ups are suppressed on the agent computer, so that the backup is completely silent to a user of that computer. If the user has manually launched the monitor app on the agent computer, they will receive notifications until log off. |
Once you are happy with the settings, select 'Finish' to create the schedule. The schedule will then be shown in the list of existing schedules:
Read more about managing existing schedules in this article.