Scheduled backups should just wait for their turn, and not fail like interactive backups

Submitted by beat on Tue, 01/25/2011 - 01:47

This morning we had message from our scheduled daily backup:

Backup failed! See the progress output above for the reason why. Total backup time was 00 minutes, 01 seconds.

Virtual servers that failed :
(ALL SERVERS HERE)

There are currently 2 backups running, and the system-wide limit is 2

Result: we don't have a daily backup now during low traffic hours.

A running backup should not make a scheduled backup FAIL but be postponed until previous ones are done.

Status: 
Closed (works as designed)

Comments

Submitted by andreychek on Tue, 01/25/2011 - 08:52

Howdy -- well, in a case like that, it requires a decent amount of intelligence within the script to determine when the other backup is done, and if it's okay to begin the other backup once it is complete.

For example, since the backups are fairly resource intensive, many folks schedule other resource intensive jobs for after the backups complete. Having a postponed backup begin later than it should may cause problems with other scheduled operations.

So I'm not sure we'd want to have Virtualmin run a backup outside it's scheduled time by default.

But could that be an option you could enable? I'm not sure, I'll pass this along to Jamie for further comment :-)

Submitted by beat on Tue, 01/25/2011 - 09:10

Thanks for passing it on.

Ending up with no backup in the morning, because a user did by misluck just a 2-minutes backup exactly at the time where we have our scheduled one is the issue here.

I guess if the scheduled backup script could retry (in the case it cannot back up because too many backups are running) every minute for at least an hour it would be ok.

We anyway have variations of 1 hour over 3 hours of backup, depending on server load... So we do plan for "low-load-time" around the main backup. ;)

Submitted by JamieCameron on Tue, 01/25/2011 - 11:18

There is actually an option to control the time Virtualmin waits for other backups to complete if too many are running, at System Settings -> Virtualmin Configuration -> Backup and Restore -> Time to wait if maximum is exceeded.

Also on that page you can select if the maximum applies to root or just domain owners..

Submitted by beat on Sat, 01/29/2011 - 17:30

Wow!

Thank you Jamie :-)

Most of our wildest dreams are already implemented even before we start dreaming of them ! :-)

So this task can be closed :-)