Is there a scheduling helper tool?

MSP360 Managed Products Managed Backup Windows
1

For most of our clients, we schedule a local and a cloud backup, both file and image, for a total of 4 backups. The primary application we’re backing up in an accounting application with multiple users. These users are entering transactions all day long, so we like to try to make multiple backups during the business day.

We’re finding it increasingly difficult to “visualize” the actual (or appropriate) times to start each of the backups since each will take a different amount of time, and we’d like to schedule each of them as close as possible to each other. Is anyone aware of a scheduling tool that will help us “optimize” our scheduled backup times? Perhaps a spreadsheet that someone has developed would suffice…? It would be nice if the software included a feature that would warn us similar to: “You’ve scheduled an image backup at a time that will likely overlap another plan that starts 2 hours earlier.” (We seem to have frequent VSS overlaps that cause a backup to fail.)

Thank you -

2

[reply=“Rainmaker;d1990”]

  1. Is there a reason you are not using Hybrid Backups? A hybrid backup plan would back up to file system storage and cloud storage in a single pass, reducing your IO on the computer by half and eliminating overlaps.

  2. If you want to keep the plans separate, then you can easily use the Backup Chain option on the Pre / Post Actions to kick off the second plan once the first one completes. That would also eliminate any overlapping plans.

3

Answer to #1: No real reason other than my old man fear that that would just be some new-fangled procedure that has a greater propensity to fail. :lol: Probably wrong on my part. Will try it!

Answer to #2: See Answer to #1.

Good suggestions! (A scheduler tool might still be helpful. :nerd: )

4

Would love to see this feature. This is something we constantly struggle with.