Create File Backup Job
Before taking file backup for your file server, a lightweight agent needs to be installed on the server, please refer to Agents for how to install agents on your file servers.
After the agents had been installed and licensed for file backup, please follow the below steps to create database backup job.
To create file backup jobs, please go to Physical Backup > File Backup > Backup page. There are 4 steps to create a file backup job.
Step1: Select Backup Source
First you need to select the file backup agents from the File Backup Agents column for this backup job. It can be selected one or more file backup agents at the same time.
After selecting the file backup agents, click on + button then you can select files/folders you want to back up from the Backup Source column. Then you can click on Advanced, the wildcard filter can be set. Wildcard Filter including None, Exclusion and Inclusion. If you choose None, backup files/folders which you have selected won’t use any filter. If you choose Exclusion, backup all files except the ones to be excluded by exclusion filters. If you choose Inclusion, only back up files which are matched by the inclusion filters. In the Filter field, type a filter rule e.g.: *.docx and click Add to add it; Multiple filters can be applied to a single backup job; can match 0, 1 or multiple characters, ? can only match 1 character.
After setting the wildcard filter, you can click on Apply to Other Agent(s) to apply the wildcard filter to other agent(s). Then click on Next to continue.
Step 2: Backup Destination
A backup destination (backup storage) should be associated with this backup job. In the Target Node dropdown list, you can select a backup node on which you want the backup data to be processed and stored. In the Target Storage dropdown list, the storages which belong to the selected backup node can be selected. When done selecting the backup storage, please click on Next button to continue.
Step 3: Backup Strategies
Under the General Strategy tab, you can set up the backup Time Schedule, Speed Controller, Data Storage Policy, Retention Policy and Advanced Strategy.
To determine the backup window of this job, the Time Windows indicator can be a reference for you to determine in which time window the job should be scheduled. In the Schedule field, you can configure the time schedule of the backup job, you can configure the job as a Backup as Scheduled job or an Once-off Backup job. For an once-off backup job, the job will only run for once, and only full backup will be performed. You only have to appoint a time of when to start the backup job in the Schedule field.
For Scheduled backup job, you can schedule Full Backup with Incremental Backup combination, Full Backup with Differential Backup combination. Here we take Full Backup with Incremental Backup as an example.
By default, full backups will be scheduled on each Friday. And incremental backups will be scheduled each day (when the time point of a full backup is overlapped with an incremental backup, full backup will be taken, and the incremental backup with be taken on the next scheduled time point). This is the most commonly used strategy that we recommended. But if you want to customize the schedules according to your requirements, you can edit the settings for either full backups or incremental backups. For example, you can schedule full backups twice a month without repeating.
Then configure several incremental backups each day, by default incremental backup will run only for once each day, to run incremental backups several times a day, you can enable the Repeat option.
In the above example, full backups will run on day 1 and day 15 of each month, incremental backups will run every 6 hours each day. This is just an example, you should configure the schedules per your requirements based on your actual environments.
Notice
1.It is recommended to run full backups on week basis and run incremental backups on daily basis.
2.It is recommended to set the backup schedule to run at night or in the other nonproduction hours.
After configuring the time schedules of the backups, next you can configure the Speed Controller, the speed controller settings are optional, only if the backup jobs will bring network or I/O overload to your production environment, you can configure the speed controller accordingly.
The speed controller policy can be configured as Permanent or As Scheduled.
Data Storage Policy including Compression and Encryption of the backup data.
By enabling Data Compression, you can save the bandwidth and storage resources for transmitting and storing the backup data. By enabling Data Encryption, the backup data will be encrypted and then stored into the backup storage. A password needs to be specified to secure the data encryption, when creating a file restore job, password verification is required to perform file restore.
Notice
After configuring a custom encryption password, please keep the encryption password corresponding to the backup job safe. If you lose the encryption password, the backup data cannot be restored.
Retention Policy can be used to define how much/long the backup data to be reserved in the backup storage, you can either define the retention policy with Number of Restore Points or Number of Days mode.
If you choose the retention policy as number of restore points, Vinchin Backup Server will save the specified number of restore points (the number of restore points is counted by full restore point), if you choose number of days, Vinchin Backup Server will save the restore points within the specified number of days, the older restore points will be deleted to comply with the retention policy. Advanced Strategy contains transfer threads and scan threads. You can set 1 to 32 transfer/scan threads for a single backup job.
Increasing the number of threads can improve backup job efficiency, but multi-threading will occupy the resources of the file server, so the number of threads should be set reasonably according to the actual situation. In order to eliminate the high efficiency backup impact on the performance of file server, users can set the transfer and scan thread number to 1. And when the scan thread has been set to 1, users also able to configure the scan speed.
The scan speed can be configured with Very Fast, Fast, Normal, Slow and Very Slow options to balance the file server performance and backup speed.
Under the Transmission Strategy tab, users can configure transmission options for file backup. If you enable the Encrypted Transfer, backup data will be transferred through SSL protocol.
When multiple networks are configured, you can choose which network to backup, the premise is that the network is connected to the file server.
Under the Advanced Strategy tab, you can enable Snapshot to ensure file backup data consistency. You can turn on Skipped Files Threshold Setting to setup the alert threshold. If the number or percentage of skipped files exceeds this threshold, the system will alert you.
Notice
To enable snapshot, you need to make sure there’s sufficient disk space, if the free space is not enough for snapshot, the snapshot process might fail.
Step 4: Review & Confirm
After completing the above-mentioned settings, you are able to review and confirm the file backup job settings in one screen. You can give this job a customized name then click on Submit to finish creating this file backup job.