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View Full Version : Scheduling a combo weekly-monthly rotating backup


jbezdek
10-03-2006, 12:40 AM
Hi there. I'm a recent convert from Retrospect and I'm a big fan. Nice piece of software.

I'd like some suggestions on how to most closely duplicate the scheduled backup plan I implemented in Retrospect. I have three backup drives--Andy, Barney, and Opie--that are backed up daily on a rotating weekly schedule. So each drive is backed up every day every three weeks. (Make sense?) This is easy for me because I know I just need to swap out the drive each Saturday night.

Due to the way SD! schedules backups (1st-4th week of the month), it's difficult (impossible?) to duplicate my "every 3 weeks" backup strategy without advanced scripting, etc. I'm therefore considering moving to a plan where two drives are used for weekly backups and the third for monthly backups.

But before I do that, I want to ask: is there a way to schedule a rotating backup plan with an odd number of backup drives? I can't figure out how to scheduled two rotating backup drives while still maintaining a significant time lapse between the backups on each drive. What I mean is: if I only have two drives that rotate (say, every other week), and each does a daily backup, there will be a day where the timestamp of the two drives will differ by only 1 day (e.g., one runs on a Saturday, the next runs on a Sunday). And in fact, the greatest difference in time stamps would only be 3-4 days. This doesn't seem like enough protection to me against unintended deletions, etc. (And even if I moved to a schedule where the backups rotated every 2 weeks, there still would be a day when the two backups would differ by only a day.)

Given SD!'s current scheduled backup abilities, my only option seems to be to jump all the way to four rotating drives. This would allow me to swap a new drive in every week and still ensure that there exists at least a week difference between every backup.

Am I missing something? Is there a way to make this work?

Thanks.
Joe

dnanian
10-03-2006, 09:20 AM
You can rotate based on any schedule you want, Joe. The easiest way to do this is the set the UUIDs of the destinations the same, and just change them out whenever you want.

See this thread (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1537) for a discussion...