Any way to specify the work order

[rgzimmer]

Is there any way to specify the work order on a group? I have a group that puts its largest volume at the end of the backup, which means that it runs longer than it should.

Thanks for any help you can give.

 

[StefanS]

Hi,

I dont know, but maybe its possible to control the order within a group to some extent, using the priority setting in the client properties.

Regards,
Stefan

 

[nandfred]

Client prioities and the way the different saveset are type with each client defines the order. While client priority are not always true, it should be most of the time. Saveset order on the client defines which save set goes first. on a unix client with the filesystems below, assuming paralleism is set to 1 for this client the saveset set will be taken in this order:
/
/usr
/var
/home
/hacmp
/data
/deploy1

Hope it helps

 

[mcurran1]

try creating a duplicate client, add it to the group, and specify only the the drive. Also create a skip directive for the other one skipping the same drive. Set the priority levels for each client.

 

[cfowler]

It's been my experience that the priority setting(s) do not function ideally. For example, if you provide client A with the highest priority and all other clients have the default priority set, NetWorker, when it's prepared to perform a backup, says "okay, who's ready to backup now?" The client with the highest priority may not always be the first one to respond.

I have clients out there that have the following order specified:

C:E:SYSTEM STATE:SYSTEM FILES:SYSTEM DB:
The system save sets ALWAYS BACKUP FIRST. I am not certain what NetWorker looks at for criteria when beginning a client, but I think, the same as labeling tapes, it will start with the smallest save sets and continue to the largest.

In this case, I would have to agree with mcurran1, however, it cannot be done in this fashion. If you attemp to create a duplicate client and add it to a group where it already exists, NetWorker will tell you the client already exists within the group. The only way to do it in this case, would be to create another group and add the duplicate client.

You might wish to check your parallelism settings as well, to ensure that your tapes are taking as many steams / multiplexing as much as possible. This might solve your issue as then you could have to the larger save set backing up at the same time as the reset. Optimizing the parallelism / target sessions can make a great deal of difference in some cases. However, it's a tricky process to determine the optimal settings for your network.

Good luck,
Carter Fowler
Hardware Service Technician
cfowler@amtelecom.net

 

[rgzimmer]

I actually run three clients of the same name in this group. Each client backs up a specific part of the server and the other clients include directives to skip the files backed up in the other two. You just can't have a client with a save set of all.

Other than my streams being limited to 21 for some unknown reason and being unable to specify the work order, everything backs up fine. The problem with changing the priority on one client is that it changes it on all of them because they are the same name.