Re: [BackupPC-users] Help with the schedule config

[Kris L. <kl...@th...>]

I'll take a stab at it.

On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 5:41 AM, Yong Zhang <hi...@ou...> wrote:

> 1) I want servers to be backed up daily, but full backup only runs on
> Saturday, how?
>

AFAIK, there isn't an easy way to determine when specific backups
(full/incr) run. My understanding is that BackupPC runs within the context
of the blackout periods and client visibility, and executes full/incr
depending upon the expiration counts of the existing backups.

That being said, you could manually start a full backup on a Saturday and
hope for the best within a 7-day cycle.  Or you can set a cron job, but
then you're missing out on the ability to automatically stagger backups.

It just occurred to me, you could leverage a DumpPreUserCmd (combined with
UserCmdCheckStatus) to verify the day (Saturday), dump type (Full), and
exit status (Yes, it is) on whether or not to proceed.  I think that a
non-zero status here would put the client back into the queue, and it would
try the same dump again upon the next wake.  There are probably other
caveats -- like whether a client sitting in the queue for a long time might
have some existing backups expired and purged in the interim, but it's
something to consider.


> 2) I want servers to have incremental backup daily for 6 days then 1 full
> backup, and keep all these backups (inc/full) for one month, but after one
> month, I only need to keep weekly full backups for 180 days (that is about
> 24 full backups total), and after 180 days, I just want to keep full
> backups at monthly basis e.g. keep one full backup one month and 12 months
> total. Is this possible and how to set the values in config?
>

If I'm reading the docs right:
* FullPeriod = 7 days
* FullPeriod * 1 = 24 backups
* FullPeriod * 2 = 0 backups
* FullPeriod * 4 = 12 backups

So KeepFullCnt = [24,0,12], with IncKeepCnt=24.  This is a little more
Lunar and less Gregorian, but that's what we get for mixing weeks and
months.