manual backup and single instance

[Flapmin]

Dear everyone on this forum,

I'm currently using the evaluation version of backupassist to see if i can use it to backup all my files.

i think i'm probably making the problem more complicated than it should be, but i'm a controlfreak. i will try to explain my setup and problem as detailed as possible:

what i want to backup: 3TB of raw foto files, 1TB of documents,programs and other stuff, (and 10 vmware vm's, i use another program for this), this is need to be backuped daily
setup: BA is installed on a windows 2012r2 machine with 4TB harddisk for foto backup and 2TB for other backup + vm's
the backup machine is located on a diffrent site and the connection between these to sites is about 10mbit (i know it is a bit slow to backup 4TB...). I made an initial backup locally and created a schedule with the single instance storage, so far so good.

to save power i want the backup system to sleep if it is not doing anything and wakeup when the backup starts and when its done go backup to sleep. i couldn't find this option in BA, so i started writing a script to run as scheduled task and start BA and the vm backup from the script 1 by 1 and create 1 mail at the end with all the results. and it works (kind off...) i start BA with "backupassistmanuallaunch" 1 -u and than wait for BA to write a notification file to a folder and than continiue to the next backup. and at the end it saves all data and sends it via mail to me.

but what i was seeing is that if my backup took to long (and it will because some days there are about 150GB of new data, and that over 10mbit takes about 24 hours) it will auto queue the next backup because it is scheduled.... so i thoughed: i can set the backup to manual and than run it, but if i do that, it will save the backup to the same folder and not make versions any more. i tried to work around this by putting the date in the destination name, but than still it is not saving as single instance storage, or i'm doing something wrong (also on manual i don't have the option to auto clean old backups).

sorry about the long post and if there are any question please ask...

so in short my question is: is it possible to have the features of single instance storage, with auto clean. but that it doesn't start automaticly everyday, but only when i start it from a script...?

PS. i was gonna say how much i l*ve BA and single instance storage because i do, but this forum thinks "l0ve" (with an "o" instead of "0") is spam.....

[michael.jones]

Hello,


It's Michael Jones from support. If I understand your request, and I think I do, you should be able to create a job, or use the one , (seconfd one you refer to,) then suspend it.

You can create a scheduled event to occur based on a specific event, like the completion of the first job, for example.

Take a look at this technet post:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/wind ... =windows-7

[Flapmin]

hi Michael,

thanks for your quick reply.

!! IT WORKS !!

I thought I already tried to put the job on disable and than run it, but I probably only removed the days from the schedule.... and that doesn't work.

but I can confirm that putting the job on disable and then starting it from my script is the solution I was looking for.

and thank for pointing out that backup assist makes event logs that I can use for my purpose, I will try to put this into my future script (I didn't know that BA makes event logs...)


so thanks so much u made this great product even greater ...

[Flapmin]

oke next "issue"

during some testing of my script I started a production backup with the manualbackup starter about 10 times... this made the backup to run 10 times and thus now my backup is 10 day's ahead (like today it is running the backup of 27-December).

is there a way with manualbackup.exe to force it to run today's backup, no mater what the next backup should be? or any other way to reset the counter so that if i make a manual backup i always run todays backup?

[TimN]

Hi,

It's Tim from BackupAssist.

I believe the problem here is occurring because the backup that you have configured and suspended is meant to run according to a 'schedule'.

This means that the next backup will run on the 'next'' day.

Try changing the schedule to 'Manual' and see if this works.

Please note that the setup that you have described is not a common setup so we have not tested it to confirm that it would work as you want it to.

Regards,

Tim

[Flapmin]

Hi tim,

thank you for your reply.

i 'm aware that my setup (as always) is not the most common setup and isn't tested (or supported propably).
i tried putting my backupjob to mannual before, but than i lose the single instance storage, versioning and auto clean up of old backups, so i don't really think that is a option.

but i was hoping i could pass a extra parameter with the "launchmanually.exe" to force it to run today's backup.

[TimN]

Hi,

It's Tim from BackupAssist.

Unfortunatley, when you run the manual executor, it just runs the next backup which will increase the date as it is doing now.

There is no work around for this with the manual launcher other than sticking to a schedule in BackupAssist.

Sorry I could not offer positive feeback.

Tim