•If you have a library, how many tapes does it hold?
•Are there times when your tape drive will be unavailable?
•Will the amount of traffic on your network require that backup jobs be scheduled to run during
•Are there certain days of the week when running lengthy jobs will interfere with other uses of your network?
As you review the following sections, keep these questions in mind to help you determine which backup job schedule to select for any particular job.
Scheduling Concepts
One of the greatest values of a data protection solution, such as Data Protector Express, is the ability to define data retention policies. Retention policies allow you to balance your data protection and historical retention needs with the economic realities of media material and management costs.
Media Sets
Data Protector Express organizes media into sets based on the rotation type and schedule interval. Whether the job requires several or only one physical media to complete, they are identified in the Data Protector Express catalog as a set. When more than one physical media is required for a job, Data Protector Express will create a unique name for each media in the set.
When planning scheduled backup jobs, it is important to know whether one or several physical media will be required to complete a backup job. This can usually be estimated by comparing the size of the backup selection to the capacity of the selected media. If you do not want Data Protector Express to use more than one media for a backup job, then you must select fewer files to back up.
NOTE: The terms media can be used to refer to both physical media, such as an LTO tape, or to the catalog object Data Protector Express uses to keep track of file versions that have been backed up.
Intervals
Job schedules are defined using the Intervals Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly. Intervals are used to defined which days a job will run, what type of backup (full, incremental, differential, or copy) will be done, and how many sets of media are dedicated to the interval. The size of an interval refers to the amount of time between runs of that interval.
When the Run repeatedly schedule type is chosen the job Configuration page will show an additional section, Interval settings, that control the schedule parameters. Each interval type is listed along with a textual description of its current setting. To customize the settings for an interval , click on one of the interval buttons. Most schedules are defined in terms of the following intervals:
Daily
— run on sequential weekdays.
Weekly
— run once per week on the day specified, for example, Friday.
Monthly
—run once per month on a day specified, such as the first day, the last day, the first Monday,
and others. You can also specify how many months should elapse between monthlies. Setting the monthly interval to every 3 months will create a backup every quarter.
Yearly
—run once per year on a specified day of the year. By increasing the interval you can also schedule a job to run once every so many years.
36 Scheduling, Rotations, and Media Management