How to configure full backup only on every day night

Hi,

I am using urbackup in last 1 month and it’s very nice but i have challanging to configure full backup only on every day night. so can you guide.

Here is one suggestion:

Configure your backup with image disabled, and with incremental backups disabled, and with full backups every 1 day.

Now, bear in mind, that the way that UrBackup works, it will calculate that start time for each backup based on 1 day after the previous backup completes, so it your backups take about 2 hours to occur, you will find that your next backup time will have some drift to it. (e.g. midnight tonight, but 2am tomorrow night, and 4am the next day, etc…)

This is not a traditional solution where you set a precise time to start the backups.

Here are some screenshots of your configuration pages:

You can also decide how many historical backups to keep. I would keep at least 3, personally.

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Thanks for your reply.

I will check and let you know.

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Problem has been resolved.

Thanks.

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Awesome. Glad to hear it.

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Oh thats why! How to disable the drifting start time? I need it starting on exact time because many other backups also running.

What sense stays behind that behaviour?

@RL2022 If you want an exact schedule & things starting completely consistently, the trick is to set the server so it doesn’t start backups, then use task scheduler on the client to start them using the client command-line interface.

I probably wouldn’t bother though, I’d just set a max simultaneous backups setting on the server & let it sort the timing out for itself.

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The problem is the time consuming full backups. It takes 2 days to backup 3,8 TB data, its mostly small files, doc, pdf, xls, png, jpg and machine generated stuff. Last frieday it starts 6 am and i had to stop it because its a working day. I start it late afternoon and lucky i was, it can setup on last stage and continue! Big advantage!! I configured the time frame on the server to Fri 21:00-23:00. So lets see how it behave with that configuration.

Why urbackup doesn’t behave like all other software and start exactly on time? I have many jobs running in the night, verry bad when they starting influencing each other. I miss the sense behind? What is the advantage of an unpredictable behavior?

The advantage appears to be that the server can manage the number of concurrent jobs based on actual activity, starting the next as soon as a slot is free, rather than whoever schedules things having to guess how long a given job will take to complete & either having excess jobs running or useless gaps between jobs.

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Run no/less full backups :slight_smile:

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I think its good to have a full WORKING backup! You can call me hysteric but i lost data once, that’s 20 years ago. There are law’s in the EU and heavy fines, in this case gov don’t accept a software bug or operator error. You have to make sure it work’s and you have to check from time to time it’s still working.
That’s why i asking for a restore option to another VM. I found 2 options in urbackup, Download as ZIP and restore on client. Does option 2 mean it will restore it on my machine where the browser runs?

Because i don’t understand why full backups have the same size as incremental?

But if there is a day between 2 backups it not make sense to drift. I mean queueing jobs is ok and common on mainframes but the first job should start on time. Why the first job is drifting? Did i misunderstand?

Hi,

Have just stumbled into this, and OP’s message indicates their issue was resolved, but…

[quote=“Bearded_Blunder, post:7, topic:11107”] If you want an exact schedule & things starting completely consistently, the trick is to set the server so it doesn’t start backups, then use task scheduler on the client to start them using the client command-line interface.
[/quote]

Noooooo…but @RL2022 hasn’t specified they want a full backup every time…

For my clients, I set the incremental backups to run every 6 hours…but then set the parameters to only allow the client to back up [automagically] in a 2-hour window - which means that, as soon as the client is allowed to automagically start a job, it has already reached the “between backups” period and therefore will maintain the same start time…but bear in mind that this will be for an incremental backup, rather than a full…

Another option would be to allow for the time drift, but “cancel it out” with one day a week that the backups don’t run, so it pulls back into line…

  • For example, configure to only allow Mon-Sat to run the backups, and the Mon job will run at the start of the allowed window, the Tues job will run 24 hours after the Mon finishes, and so on…but missing the Sun job means that the “time creep” will be limited and reset each weekend…

You can specify the backup type on the command line as well as just starting whatever the server wants… I’m puzzlwed why you said

there.

I did the same more or less. I set the incremental from Mon 2 Fri in a 2 hour timeframe and the full backup on Fri in a 2 hour timeframe.
Now it looks like it drift’s in this 2 hour timeframe, maybe i can shrink it to 1 hour in the future. I can move the other backups and sync’s so there will be nearly no influence, more or less. :slight_smile:

This is how the backups are set for me…have set it at a group level to simplify any changes I want to make…


Incrementals set to run every 20 hours, but can be anything lower than the end of one window to the start of the next, as long as it won’t run a second time within the same “allowed” window…with the full set for 3 days, with the same constraints…

UrBackup is not designed from the perspective of starting job times, but of durations between regular backups. It’s a different paradigm, but I really like it.

Instead of scheduling a backup to start every 4 hours, I’m basically asking for the second backup to start 4 hours after the previous one has finished. It makes setting up schedules for an ever increasing number of backups easier, IMO.

What you can do to have consistent starting times:

Create a backup window that starts exactly at the time you want the backup to start. Set the interval for backups to x hours where x is the time between the start and the end of the backup window. This way the backups should always start at the same time of the day.