Backup Schedules

BackupAssist provides a selection of schemes to select from during the creation of your backup job. These schemes provide popular combinations of daily and archive backups as well as a Custom Scheme option, which allows you to select you own combination of daily and archive backups.

Daily and Archive backups

Daily backups are run through the week (e.g. Monday to Friday) and provide backups that can be used to restore recent data. They are often overwritten during each media rotation. Archive backups are run periodically (e.g. weekly, monthly) and retained for long periods. They provide a secure, historical backup and the ability to restore early versions of data a long time after the backup was made.

If you are using removable media as the backup destination, it is best practice to have the daily and archive backups stored off site, and have the media required brought on site on the day it is required.

How schedules run

Backups that run after midnight are usually for data from the previous day, and part of the previous day’s backup. To ensure the correct backup applies to the correct day, BackupAssist treats a day as being 6.00am to 5.59am (not 12.00am to 11.59pm). E.g. 2.30am on Tuesday is considered Monday.

If you have scheduled jobs overlapping, they will be placed in a queue and run one at a time.

The Custom scheme

This scheme selection allows you to create a custom backup rotation with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly backup options. You can select the Custom scheme option when you create a new backup job, or by using the Select a new schedule option when you are editing an existing job.

Editing an existing schedule

You can edit an existing backup job by selecting the job on the Manage menu, and then selecting Edit and Scheduling. The Scheduling page shows the details of the scheme selected in the Schedule step when the backup job was created.

What is shown on the Scheduling screen will depend on the type of backup job, the type of backup destination and scheme selected. Below is an overview of the different sections that the Scheduling page can include.

Manage : Scheduling

To learn more, see Manage : Schedule

For more information about Backup scheduling, see our scheduling blog articles part 1 and part 2.