Is there a neater way of doing the following than the one I've thought of? I want to be able to combine daily backups with being able to go back several months. The only way I can think of doing this without having a massive set of backup files (i.e. daily backups going back a year or so) is to have two jobs, one that runs daily and keeps, say, 14 sessions, and the other that runs every two weeks and keeps all sessions. Is there a way of combining these in a single job (i.e. getting AISBackup to prune sessions over a certain age such that only, for example, fortnightly ones are kept)?
Cheers
Hugh
Pruning old backups
Hi
I guess we need to be able to prune sessions ‘in the middle’ of a session based backup. This is possible with some (a lot) of thought as we will only be able to delete files that are no longer required within those sessions and have not been marked as ‘backed up again’ in a later session.
What is probably worse is explaining the option in the help text / User interface so that everybody understands what is happening.
It is very easy for us to delete sessions from the last session backwards as all the files are held in complete zip files, which we simply have to delete. We then adjust the Backup Contents File to remove file files that were contained on the deleted zip files. Based on this we could backup Saturday to Thursday and then on the next run of AISBackup on or after Friday remove all sessions back to the last ‘check point’ Friday. Once you make sense of what I mean perhaps you can turn it into English for the help file
The only way I can think of doing what you really want is to delay the weekly erase for a week and keep the Backup Contents File on ;’standby’ just in case you need to restore a file from ‘last week’.. Actually this is not too complicated if the backup is to removable media like CD, Rev or Zip because a new disc could be used at the start of each weekly ‘daily’ session and the backup re-set to the end of the last ‘weekly’ session. Just keep last week’s daily disc as long as you want because the up-to-date backup contents file is contained on that disc. Is your brain hurting?
BTW: and multi-removable media backup can be reset to an earlier time by using the Manage Backup / Import Backup Contents File option from media used earlier in the backup sessions.
Suggestions anybody?
We had an e-mail, quite a while ago, requesting that when we prune from the beginning of a ‘disk’ based backup that we have an option to archive the deleted parts to removable media so the backup become a hybrid Disk / network / Removable media. This is not too easy, but if anybody is interested, let us know.
Barry
I guess we need to be able to prune sessions ‘in the middle’ of a session based backup. This is possible with some (a lot) of thought as we will only be able to delete files that are no longer required within those sessions and have not been marked as ‘backed up again’ in a later session.
What is probably worse is explaining the option in the help text / User interface so that everybody understands what is happening.
It is very easy for us to delete sessions from the last session backwards as all the files are held in complete zip files, which we simply have to delete. We then adjust the Backup Contents File to remove file files that were contained on the deleted zip files. Based on this we could backup Saturday to Thursday and then on the next run of AISBackup on or after Friday remove all sessions back to the last ‘check point’ Friday. Once you make sense of what I mean perhaps you can turn it into English for the help file
The only way I can think of doing what you really want is to delay the weekly erase for a week and keep the Backup Contents File on ;’standby’ just in case you need to restore a file from ‘last week’.. Actually this is not too complicated if the backup is to removable media like CD, Rev or Zip because a new disc could be used at the start of each weekly ‘daily’ session and the backup re-set to the end of the last ‘weekly’ session. Just keep last week’s daily disc as long as you want because the up-to-date backup contents file is contained on that disc. Is your brain hurting?
BTW: and multi-removable media backup can be reset to an earlier time by using the Manage Backup / Import Backup Contents File option from media used earlier in the backup sessions.
Suggestions anybody?
We had an e-mail, quite a while ago, requesting that when we prune from the beginning of a ‘disk’ based backup that we have an option to archive the deleted parts to removable media so the backup become a hybrid Disk / network / Removable media. This is not too easy, but if anybody is interested, let us know.
Barry
Sorry about the delay in replying: I hadn't realized this was going to be such a difficult issue, but I can see why, now you're explained it.
First principle I'd suggest is as follows: I'd avoid getting into any solutions that are backup media-specific. One of the great strengths of AISBackup, as far as I can tell, is that it's pretty media-independent, and indeed in my case the backups I'm looking at are to an ftp server and to a network drive. So the solution you're suggesting that would need disks wouldn't be a runner for me. And your first thought (deleting the daily backups for the week, before doing the weekly one) would mean that one wouldn't be able to access any sessions between last Friday and this Friday, which would be a problem.
Finally, only being able to delete files that aren't marked as 'backed up again' would presumably take away a lot from the value of the exercise, I guess.
So maybe this suggestion goes back to a back burner, and I just stop trying to invent work for overworked programmers and carry on with two independent jobs: (a) daily, keeping 14 sessions, and (b) fortnightly, keeping all sessions. It's simple enough, and it seems to work, at the cost of a bit more backup storage space used up. Does that make sense?
Cheers
Hugh
First principle I'd suggest is as follows: I'd avoid getting into any solutions that are backup media-specific. One of the great strengths of AISBackup, as far as I can tell, is that it's pretty media-independent, and indeed in my case the backups I'm looking at are to an ftp server and to a network drive. So the solution you're suggesting that would need disks wouldn't be a runner for me. And your first thought (deleting the daily backups for the week, before doing the weekly one) would mean that one wouldn't be able to access any sessions between last Friday and this Friday, which would be a problem.
Finally, only being able to delete files that aren't marked as 'backed up again' would presumably take away a lot from the value of the exercise, I guess.
So maybe this suggestion goes back to a back burner, and I just stop trying to invent work for overworked programmers and carry on with two independent jobs: (a) daily, keeping 14 sessions, and (b) fortnightly, keeping all sessions. It's simple enough, and it seems to work, at the cost of a bit more backup storage space used up. Does that make sense?
Cheers
Hugh
On the topic of pruning old backups: Does anyone remember an old backup software called Palindrome?
They had a neato scheme called Towers Of Hanoi: it kept backups from 1 day ago, 2 days ago, 4 days ago, 8 days ago, etc... I loved it -- I had lots of recent copies, and few old copies, and a very few ancient copies.
AISB might approximate Towers Of Hanoi with a carefully designed pruning algorithm. I'd have to think about it for a while... you would pick sessions to prune such that the resulting pattern of kept sessions resembled the powers of two pattern. Hmmmm....
I'll admit that TOH took a little faith. You were never certain exactly which days you had until you looked. But because you are not able to predict what day you are going to need either, it didn't actually matter. You were not any worse off than with a fixed pattern scheme.
(To handle the fixed requirement for a before-end-of-month backup, I used to use a seperate job.)
As the person above suggested, I'm going to approximate a decreasing-density-of-coverage scheme by making multiple jobs that run at different frequencies. There will be some wasted space, but disk is cheap these days.
Anyway, just rambling ideas...
-Kirby
They had a neato scheme called Towers Of Hanoi: it kept backups from 1 day ago, 2 days ago, 4 days ago, 8 days ago, etc... I loved it -- I had lots of recent copies, and few old copies, and a very few ancient copies.
AISB might approximate Towers Of Hanoi with a carefully designed pruning algorithm. I'd have to think about it for a while... you would pick sessions to prune such that the resulting pattern of kept sessions resembled the powers of two pattern. Hmmmm....
I'll admit that TOH took a little faith. You were never certain exactly which days you had until you looked. But because you are not able to predict what day you are going to need either, it didn't actually matter. You were not any worse off than with a fixed pattern scheme.
(To handle the fixed requirement for a before-end-of-month backup, I used to use a seperate job.)
As the person above suggested, I'm going to approximate a decreasing-density-of-coverage scheme by making multiple jobs that run at different frequencies. There will be some wasted space, but disk is cheap these days.
Anyway, just rambling ideas...
-Kirby
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