Forum Discussion

Aspirant

Sep 17, 2022

ReadyNAS Backup Scheduling

I have multiple shares that are backed-up weekly from one NAS to another. Recently, this has become an issue because all the backups are configured to do a full followed by 3 incremental, which means...

StephenB

Guru - Experienced User

Sep 17, 2022

Sandshark wrote:

You can try creating the full backups as separate jobs and then editing /etc/cron.d/frontview-backup to change the frequency, but I don't know how that will affect the GUI. And you'd need to be comfortable with the Linux command line to implement it. Any other change via the GUI would likely undo your manual edits, so you'd have to do them again.

I've done this something like this with frontview-volumeschedule, though for a different purpose (starting up maintenance tasks on days when my backup NAS were turned on, since they are on a power schedule).

You would need to examine backup_jobs.conf in order to determine the job number associated with each backup.

daKlone

Aspirant

Sep 18, 2022

Thanks guys, much appreciated. 👍

I've also got my target NAS (the RN104) on a power schedule, so currently it switches on once a week, pulls the backups and then shuts down again (eventually!).

I'll have a look at configuring it using cron.d and no doubt come back with more questions! 😉

daKlone
Aspirant
Sep 18, 2022
So my frontview-backup has entries like this:

5 00-23/24 * * mon root /frontview/bin/fvbackup 007 &> /dev/null

where '007' correlates to the 7th backup job in the list shown in the GUI.

So I looked in /frontview/bin expecting to see a file called '007' that would contain the definition of the backup job, including when to do a full and when to do an incremental, but there isn't one.

Does anyone know where '007' is? (and don't say "ask Ms Moneypenny" 😁).
- Sandshark
  Sensei
  Sep 18, 2022
  /etc/frontview/backup_jobs.conf. This appears to be something read by the GUI and fvbackup to set up and execute the backups. Items like the frequency appear to be only for the GUI, as /etc/cron.d/frontview-backup does the actual scheduling.
  - daKlone
    Aspirant
    Sep 18, 2022
    Ah, of course. StephenB did mention that earlier 🙈
    
    So it looks like the mechanism for keeping track of when the full backups are done must be internal to fvbackup, as backup_jobs.conf only has a key for <opt_full_backup_freq>. This key just has one of the GUI options in it (never, every 4 weeks or whatever) so there's nothing saying "next full backup in 2 weeks" or "last full backup on this date" some such.
    
    So it looks like there isn't a way to stagger the full backups other than to set one to 'every 4 weeks' with all the others set to 'never', wait a week then set another to 'every 4 weeks' and so on until schedule is right. Or am I missing something obvious?