Read the full series:
|
Ch.1 – Architecture & Requirements |
Ch.9 – Volume recovery |
Scheduling is an important part of your backup strategy. Whether you run your backup at noon or in the middle of the night can be an important decision for you. When is your computer running and available for backup? Do you want to run it after a long day of work or before the day starts? Do you want to run it whenever you attach your backup storage or connected to the network? And how many time need to be minimum between different backups? Those of you that work with servers know that it isn’t always easy to find the right timing to perform your backups and with endpoints such as laptops and desktops it even gets more difficult.
Luckily Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE foresees in very flexible schedule options. Let’s have a look at them in depth.
Periodically
The first option you can choose from is a daily backup. For example, every day at 02.00 am in the morning when you are (normally) sleeping. While this is a great possibility because you can perform your backups when you are not working, your computer won’t be always available at that time. Energy-saving is important these days so you don’t want to let your computer run at night for a backup alone. Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE foresees in some great functionality that allows you to wake up your computer for a backup and hibernate or shutdown afterwards. Please NOTE that the wake-up functionality does not work when you are using the connected standby power model, which is mainly used for tablets.
On event
The second possibility (actually possibilities) you have is to trigger the backup on a specific event. This means you won’t be starting the backup on a time schedule. Again we provide you with some very powerful possibilities. You can start the backup on the following events:
- Lock
- Log off
- When backup target is connected.
At lock and log off speak for itself. Whenever you lock your endpoint, or whenever you log off from your endpoint, the backup will start. The option to start the backup whenever the backup target is connected is a bit different but can be very powerful. Whenever you are protecting your endpoint to a removable drive, share or anything else, there is a possibility that the backup target isn’t always connected. This event will be triggered whenever that backup target gets connected to the endpoint.
This will work whenever you connect a USB device and remote storage but also whenever you connect to a network where your backup target is reachable.
For people that aren’t always connected to their backup target, this is extremely handy. For example, when you are disconnected from the network share that you use as a backup target (because of travel or any other reason) the system will automatically start the backup whenever it has access to that target again.
And there is another fantastic option available. Because you probably lock your computer a few times a day, or you connect your backup storage a couple of times, we have the option to block the backup as long as the previous one was performed less than X hours (or X minutes, days). This means that you can lock your computer multiple times a day, it won’t start a new backup every time unless the latest valid backup is older than X hours.
Combine the scheduling
What if you are able to combine the scheduling? Wouldn’t that be extremely flexible? Yes it is, and that is exactly what you can do with Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE. As I already stated it is sometimes very difficult to schedule the backup for an endpoint device depending on the behavior of the user. Road warriors such as myself aren’t always connected and switch time zones very often. Backing up on a daily basis at a fixed hour works when I am at my office, but on the road not so much. Also my backup target isn’t always connected (difficult to attach my USB device on a plane, when I am in an airport or for whatever other reason…). By using a combination of event triggers and a daily schedule, and by making sure that there is no new backup every 12 hours, I have a powerful schedule and I know that my data is protected on regular base, even when I don’t think about it because I am busy with many other things
Conclusion
Scheduling isn’t always the easiest task when you are dealing with devices that aren’t always connected or even running. Therefore Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE foresees in different methods based on triggers or a time schedule to meet your needs. Combining different scheduling events, you got a lot of possibilities to make sure that your endpoint data is protected as much as possible and available whenever it is necessary.
For more information, watch the video.
Read the next chapter:
- Ch.6 – Administration