Re: [BackupPC-users] suggestion: make wakeups start at 8am

[Adam G. <mai...@we...>]

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Filipe Brandenburger wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 11:39, Les Mikesell<les...@gm...> wrote:
>>> Also, as an aside, the process should probably be renamed to
>>> BackupPC_daily, as it makes more sense to run it during the day when
>>> backups are not running. Isn't that right?
>> I'm not sure you can make a general assumption about when backups are
>> run.  Most places would catch machines that are on all the time at night
>> but there may also be a lot of desktop machines that are either started
>> manually through the web interface or caught outside of the blackout
>> time because they aren't available at night.
>
> Agreed, however some default has to be provided and the current one
> (1am) may not be the best possible one.
>
> As you said yourself in another thread, even though BackupPC_nightly
> can be run while other backups are running, it is better to do so
> while no or few backups are running so that they do not compete for
> disk I/O and there is also the locking overhead of both potentially
> accessing the same files (don't know exactly how that works, but just
> disk I/O is enough reason to do it while other backups are not
> running).
>
> I agree with the OP that 8am would be more sensible considering it is
> inside the default blackout period (when most heavy backups should be
> finished and less backups should be running). Someone who uses a
> different setup (backups during the day, at noon, etc.) will have to
> customize these settings anyway, so they can also choose the best time
> for BackupPC_nightly at that time.
>
> The suggestion on the name change is that "nightly" implies it should
> be run during the night, when in fact what you want is to run it once
> a day, at the time that is more convenient for you.
Maybe a more simple change is to add a comment to the blackout
schedule section advising to set the nightly/daily run to during the
blackout schedule. Also adding a comment to the daily/nightly section
advising to schedule this for a time when you are least likely to run
backups to improve performance. Also note that you can run it during a
backup if desired.

I also agree that setting the default time inside the default backup
window is a good idea, that way if someone decides to change the
default, then it is up to them to also change the other value...

I also agree on renaming to daily, consider /etc/cron.daily etc, it is
something that should be run every 24 hours, not needed to run at night.

As to running it at intervals less than 24 hours, I'm not sure I see
the advantage, better to just get it to process a smaller section of
your backup pool each day, rather than run it on the whole pool every
x days...

Regards,
Adam
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