Schedule Plan

Introduction

If you are new to Zmanda backup framework, we suggest you start with the 10-minute summary on Zmanda, followed by the backup overview. If you are here, we assume you have the backup server and backup agent running or are seeking to learn more about schedule plans.

A ZMC schedule plan defines the interval in which a backup happens. Ideally, this window is when your organization's network traffic is the lowest to prevent network congestion. If different subnets experience different network loads simultaneously, creating schedule plans for specific subnets would help.

Using the schedule plan object, you can schedule backups to run daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or on any custom day of the week. Once you decide on the frequency for the backup, you then decide on the duration between full and incremental backups. There isn't a perfect answer on the ideal interval, as in situations where your data is in Petabytes, a full backup every ten intervals wouldn't be feasible. We recommend deciding the frequency of full backups based on retrieval frequency. Vaulted data could go a year between full backups, whereas for real-time production data, a full backup every seven incremental backups would be ideal. The closer the full backup is to your restore image, the quicker the restore process will be.

In the below scenario, the restore image is five incremental backups away from the full backup. Thus, when you want to run a restore, Zmanda rebuilds the restore image by merging the full backup with all five incremental backups. The higher the delta from the full backup, the higher the restore time.

If needed, you can link one schedule plan to multiple backup sets in a 1-n mapping. This way, all backup sets that must trigger simultaneously can be linked to one schedule plan.

How to Create an Intelligent Schedule

Once you log in to your ZMC control plane, click on the Schedule Plan in the side menu. The schedule plan overview screen will load, listing all your existing schedules. To define a new backup interval, click on the Add Schedule button on the top right, and ZMC will present you with three options: daily, weekly and monthly intervals.

Details for each field are given below.

Schedule Name: You can give a unique name to the created schedule to easily distinguish it.

Time Zone dropdown: You can choose the time zone closest to you to ensure all backup servers run by the time selected from the ZMC control plane.

Schedule Date: You define the start date of the schedule via the date picker interface.

Schedule Time: You define the schedule's start time via the clock dial interface. The reference time is the timezone you specified

Full Backup Time Specified: You can enable this checkbox to specify when the backup server should perform a full backup. On selecting this checkbox, ZMC will present a new time field.

Select Backup Type for Weekly days: This allows you to specify what category of backup must be performed on which days of the week. On selecting Auto, Zmanda intelligently decides if a full or incremental backup is needed based on when Zmanda performed the last full backup.

Select Months: This allows you to configure your backup schedule for months of the year, anything between Jan-Dec.

Select Weeks: This allows you to configure your backup schedule in weeks. You can configure it for up to five weeks of the month.