Netgear Readynas Scheduler - Need Consistency Between Volume Maintenance and Backup Jobs
It has been mentioned for -years- in customer posts that the scheduling in Backup Jobs could be better. This could simply be addressed by providing the same Scheduler interface that exists now in OS/6 for Volume Maintenance.
When I select the Monthly view in Volume Maintenance scheduling, I can determine what weekly maintenance I want to run: Week 1, Scrub, Week 2, Defrag, Week 3, Balance, and Week 4, Disk Test. Of course, you wouldn't want to be running these maintenance tasks at the same time as a large backup, but you can't select the day of the month, only the day of the week. So, a conflict in scheduling between Backup Jobs and Volume Maintenance is almost guaranteed.
Please just move the Monthly option currently in Volume Maintenance and make it also available under Backup Jobs and the ReadyNAS world will be a better place.
Thank you.
[Horrible experience trying to open this suggestion. So, I could have become distracted and suggested this become a much better User Experience, but perhaps another time.]
Re: Netgear Readynas Scheduler - Need Consistency Between Volume Maintenance and Backup Jobs
I have found a workaround for the Frontview scheduling limitations and I will be testing this for a month or two.
By defining the backup job in FrontView Backup, you will be able to leverage most of the monitoring capabilities, including screen updates for Time Initiated, In Progress, Completion, and Logs. You will see Not Scheduled in the appropriate place on the screen once you toggle off frontview-backup as the scheduler configuration.
When the jobs are defined in Frontview Backup, the definitions are kept in /etc/frontview/backup_jobs.conf, which is important if you have more than one job. You will need to know the Job ID, such as 001 or 002, in order to execute the correct job when you want it executed. I mistakenly assumed that I only had a single job so it must be 001, but it wasn't because 001 was deleted at some point and the lowest numbered job was now 002. So, know your job numbers. Maybe leave them as part of the name (which was the default when it was created).
I would create a job and schedule it normally, except I would schedule it yesterday so it didn't execute. I would then go to the /etc/cron.d/frontview-backups and copy the crontab entry for the job or jobs I wanted to change. These entries include the fvbackup command and the job id as an argument. I insert these into the normal crontab using "crontab -e" and adjust when I would like them to be executed. I might select Day-of-Month 1,8,15,22,29 or any variations that work for me. In one case I have one job that runs the first and third weeks to backup to USB_HDD_1 and a similar job that runs the second and fourth week to backup to USB_HDD_2. In all cases, my backups avoid overlap with Volume Maintenance activities that I rotate through once a month: Defrag, Balance, Disk Test and Scrub.
Once you have inserted the entries you want in the crontab, you should uncheck the Frontview "scheduled" button, and the entry will disappear from the frontview-backups cron. Do not delete the job so you can still see activity and logs through Frontview.
Of course, your mileage may vary and mistakes while working at the operating system level may render your system non-functional. I do not offer any warranty, technical support or advice if you attempt this, but am only sharing the workaround I intend to use until Netgear makes this possible through Frontview. And, who knows, any new release of firmware could make this work better or worse or not at all. So, there you go.
